Using the terminal all day I figured I should ‘sharpen the axe’ a bit. I have played around with configuring bash, but mostly I don’t know what I am doing in that .bashrc file. I tried a few ways to get the terminal tab titles to be something shorter so they would actually be usefull for example.
no luck there.
Tried customizing the prompt to include git status if I was in a git repo. Got that one to sorta work, but screwed up some other stuff in the process.
Then I noticed zsh is a alternative that has a vocal fan base. Thought I’d see if it lived up to the hype. I’ve been using it for a couple months now, and so far I think I like it, but I am sure I have only scratched the surface of what it is capable of. which was probably true of bash as well…
Anyway, installing isn’t to hard, but not very obvious so I thought I would document how I did it to see if anyone wanted to chime in on how I did it wrong, or possibly would find it useful.
First install zsh package from Software Centere or using apt-get install zsh Use bash terminal one last time to install oh-my-zsh
Open edit > profile preferences in the terminal menu on the second tab ‘Title and Command’ check ‘Run custom command instead of my shell’ and enter zsh in the text input. Restart Terminal Viola! edit .zshrc as desired.
2020 update
Use oh-my-zsh. It’s good!