Rewriting my .zshrc

Ten years ago, I started to use Zsh, a shell designed for interactive use but which is also powerful for scripting usage. I had a fairly comprehensive .zshrc file split in several parts. I have decided to rewrite it for several reasons:

1. I did not take advantage of several features of Zsh, like some advanced parameter expansion, arrays, arithmetic expressions and other built-in features. There were a lot of | head, | awk, | sed that could be replaced by some Zsh wizardry (something easier to read like ${${(f)~~"$(</etc/hosts)"}%%\#*}).

2. It contained a lot of hacks to make things work on some odd/old setups. I was not really sure that these hacks are useful anymore. It also contained a lot of conditionals where some parts of the code were executed depending on the hostname.

I have discovered oh-my-zsh, a nice project trying to provide a generic and flexible Zsh configuration:

A community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 40+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 80 terminal themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

The idea of such a project is to fork it and make the changes that you need. I was previously hacking around Phil!’s Zsh Prompt for my prompt. oh-my-zsh contains a close theme (jonathan). Neat. However, I decided to write my .zshrc from scratch (but with some snippets stolen from oh-my-zsh). Why? Mostly because I want to precisely configure Zsh. Even with its plugin architecture and its override mechanism, oh-my-zsh provides some features (options, aliases, functions) that I do not want. Thanks to git, you can fork and make any local changes you want but since I would have modified most of the files, it seemed easier to just start from scratch.

I have published the result on GitHub. You can use it as is, fork it or (better) steal and adapt some snippets for your own usage. Here is the mandatory screenshot for the prompt (no much space left for the commands):

Here is a short snippet used to select a sensible EDITOR depending on what is available. It uses anonymous functions (to restrict the scope of local variables), arrays and flags in parameter expansion. For another example, take a look on how I select a valid locale.

() {
    local -a editors
    local editor
    editors=(
        "emacs23 -Q -D -nw" # Fast emacs
        "jove" "mg" "jed"   # Emacs clone
        "vim" "vi"          # vi
        "editor")           # fallback
    for editor in $editors; do
        (( $+commands[$editor[(w)1]] )) && {
            export EDITOR=$editor
            break
        }
    done
}

Enjoy!

__() {
    local -a editors
    local editor
    ...
} && __