learning a new shell: zsh

So I’ve decided to start learning a new shell.  I see so much talk about zsh and finally, I’m going to attempt to learn to use it.  I installed it and started using it and a few things are immediately different.

Command completion is different, but slightly annoying.  I like how completion doesn’t scroll the terminal, it is paged AND appears below the command being completed.  (I didn’t like that at first, but now I think its actually quite ingenius) That being said, I which movement around the completion was more vi-like.  I want to use my home row movement keys “h j k l” and not move my hand all the way down to the arrow keys. Talk about inefficient.  Any zsh’ers out there know how to change that?  I’m sure there is a way, but I really haven’t had the time to go through a lot of documentation on it.

I’ve started to realize my only attachment to bash is familiarity and not features. I’ve used bash for more than 5 years now and while I use it extensively, I really believe that zsh most likely has done it better than bash.  A few things hint me this way just by using it for a few moments.

Btw, what’s with zsh assuming when I type something like:

bin

It cd’s me into my bin directory.  That’s all well and good, but when it comes to ‘help’, it just cd’s me into my help/ directory… Is there no bash help equivilent in zsh?  I guess I’d just find that rather odd as I am assuming there are plenty of shell built-in commands and help just seems natural.  Or maybe bash has tainted my “natural” sense.

Anyways, I’m on this new kick of trying to blog reguarly, so I really just needed an excuse to blog.  Let me know where to start with zsh!

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