Mistakes made and lessons learnt - bash to zsh

Bash to zsh

Recently, I migrated from using bash go zsh as most of us did.

chsh -s /bin/zsh easy right :)

But somehow I managed to break my terminal in the process of setting up AndroidStudio. I am not a shell pro but I like to keep couple of adb and git commands as alias, so that I can use AndroidStudio Terminal or System Terminal to perform quick actions. All, I wanted to do was to add the path to android-sdk and platform-tools to the system path so that all the adb commands would be recognized and life would be simple. But somehow I managed to break it.

These are the steps I took to kind of migrate everything my .bash_profile had over to zsh.

Setting up Android SDK and platform path

• create .zshrc file -> nano ~/.zshrc

• add the path to zshrc . We can open and edit this file in TextEditor or edit it in the terminal itself like:

  • vi ~/.zshrc ,then press i for insert, paste the path, then :wq for write and quit.
  • something like below:

export PATH='$PATH:/~YOUR_HOME/Library/Android/sdk'
export PATH='$PATH:/~YOUR_HOME/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools'

• At this point, most of you might already notice the mistake in the above snippet. Somehow, having the quotes broke everything and nothing worked. When I say nothing, I mean the cd, ls, cd .. etc. commands from the system's zsh (/bin/zsh) also didn't work. Once, I delete these two lines, everything would work and I would be where I started, i.e. adb commands wouldn't work.

• The key to this was to remove the quotes surrounding the path. Once I removed those, everything started working fine.
  

export PATH=$PATH:/~YOUR_HOME/Library/Android/sdk
export PATH=$PATH:/~YOUR_HOME/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools

• One way to verify this is to check the path in the terminal, and the path now should include path to android-sdk and platform-tools, this is the command echo $PATH.

Setting up .zprofile corollary to .bash_profile

• create .zprofile file -> nano ~/.zprofile
• add the aliases to .zprofile . We can open and edit this file in TextEditor or edit it in the terminal itself like:
  • vi ~/.zprofile ,then press i for insert, paste the path, then :wq for write and quit.

Bonus - some aliases that I use

# Git Commands
alias gf='git fetch'
alias gp='git pull'
alias gs='git status'
alias gcd='git checkout develop' #or master if you have master

# Gradle Commands
alias at='./gradlew assembleDebug assembleAndroidTest'
alias allTest='./gradlew assembleDebug testDebugUnitTest'
alias cbc='./gradlew cleanBuildCache'
alias build='./gradlew build'
alias stop='./gradlew --stop'
alias status='./gradlew --status'

# ADB Commands
alias devs='adb devices'
alias kill='adb kill server'
alias restart='adb restart server'

Please comment if there better ways of doing this and feel free to add more helpful aliases.

Thank you!