Random zsh tips
My friend fREW and I both use zsh, and we've picked up a number of tricks over the years. We decided to collaborate on a post sharing some assorted tips that can really improve the zsh experience!
Noclobber
This is a small thing, but it's saved me from many a headache. I (Rob) will often be working on some data, and I'll squirrel away a long-running or expensive computation to a temporary file, like so:
$ long-running-or-expensive-command > /tmp/data
All's well and good, until I search through history too far, or until I mistype a search that yields the above command line, and I overzealously hit enter - whoops, there goes that data! This is especially frustrating if the data you just clobbered changes over time, and there was a case in the old data that isn't present in the new! Or maybe you saved the data, got on a plane, and wanted to work with it.
Well, if you set noclobber
in your zshrc, zsh will prevent you from making this mistake - it will refuse to run commands that would destroy a file via shell redirection (something like curl -Lo my-data.txt http://example.com/data.txt
will still clobber my-data.txt
). You can override this via the >|
operator - personally, I prefer to explicitly rm
the destination file and then re-run the command.
On a side note - wouldn't it be cool if the shell were smart enough to only clobber the destination file in the case of success, or if the shell somehow knew that long-running-or-expensive-command
could result in different results? Or maybe it would be neat to have a facility to keep a history of temporary files as you work with them!
Vi Mode
Like noclobber, another little tweak that changed how I use zsh: bindkey -v
to enable Vi mode! I was skeptical about this until I tried it, but if you're a Vim user, I recommend you at least try it out and see how you like it - I feel like it's made me so much more efficient at editing command lines over the years!
Widgets & Keybindings
zsh provides a feature called "widgets", which are really just functions that have a special relationship with the line editor. They're used to implement all of the various keybindings - for example, the default keymap assigns (most) keys to the self-insert
widget, which inserts the character corresponding to the key you just typed into the line editor.
You can view the current keybindings via bindkey -L
(if you're using vi mode, you might want to check out bindkey -L -M vicmd
as well to see what widgets are bound in command mode) - this can reveal some interesting key combinations you didn't know about before! There are plenty of widgets that aren't bound to anything by default - you can find a bunch of interesting widgets in man zshzle
and man zshcontrib
.
It's also pretty easy to write your own - for example, I will sometimes accidentally type !4
instead of !$
, which expands to the fourth entry in my history. This is never what I want, so I wrote a little widget to detect this situation and fix it to expand !$
instead.
Tips by fREW
Here are some random, but cool, features that I (fREW) really enjoy:
push-line
I bound the q
key in the vicmd
mode to push-line
like this:
bindkey -M vicmd "q" push-line
What this does is set aside the current commandline, give you a fresh commandline to modify, and then pop the current line back. I typically use it in situations like this:
$ vi some/dir/some/file<ESC>q
$ mkdir -p some/dir/some/
$ vi some/dir/some/file
AUTO_PUSHD
In both zsh and bash you can use pushd some/dir
to change directory intosome/dir
, and then if you use popd
you'll change directory back to where you came from. If you set the AUTO_PUSHD
option, cd
will automaticallypushd
for you. I'll then use popd
(or my alias for it, the symettricalmk
) to get back to where I started.
global aliases
In zsh
you can have aliases that are allowed anywhere in a commandline. I use G
and L
constantly below, and always forget that I've defined V
even though I do that action manually a lot:
alias -g G="| grep"
alias -g L="| $PAGER"
alias -g V="| vim -"
Example:
$ long-out-is-long G needle # finds lines matching needle
$ curl https://blog.afoolishmanifest.com/ L # runs with pager
You can also pass arguments! This works fine:
$ ls G -P '^f'
History Events
This tip has been shared a lot over the years, but honestly it's one of my favorites, and I feel like it saves me so much time and typing! Let's say you're on the command line, and you issue the following commands:
$ mkdir a-really-long-directory-name
$ cd a-really-long-directory-name
It's no fun having to type that long directory name twice, is it? Fortunately, you can use history expansion (see "History Expansion" in man zshexpn
for more details) to save yourself some time here:
- You can use
!$
to refer to the last argument of the previous command - so thatcd
above could be written ascd !$
. This is probably my most-used expansion, especially withcd
- I have even tweaked mycd
so that if my previous command was agit clone
,cd !$
will do the right thing and change directory into the repository I just cloned! - You can use
!^
to refer to the first argument of the previous command - I sometimes will do something likemv file.txt dir/
and thenvim !$/!^
to edit the file I just moved! -
!!
expands to the entire previous command line - you'll often come across this in the idiomsudo !!
to re-invoke a command with sudo permissions, and I will sometimes dotime !!
to time a command I just ran. Another way I use this is diffing output of commands - I'll do something likesome-command > /tmp/good-results
, runsome-other-command
and eyeball the results, and then docombine <(!!) not /tmp/good-results
to compare the two! -
!*
expands to the entire previous command line's arguments - so the same as!!
, just without the command itself. -
...:h
,...:t
allows you to do some path manipulation on the expansion -:h
removes a trailing path component,:t
extracts the trailing path component, etc. It comes in handy if you do something likevim long/path/to/a/file.txt
, and then you want to search the directoryfile.txt
is in - it's just anack SEARCH_STRING !$:h
away! -
!!:2
allows you to refer to the second argument of the previous command - you can use any numbern
in!!:n
, but honestly I only ever find myself really using!!:2
, because at a point it's easier to copy and paste or something rather than count how many tokens into your command line the argument is.
We hope you found something useful that you're itching to try out here! If you're interested in checking out our zsh configs, here they are:
Many thanks to fREW for contributing to this post!
Top comments (1)
A lot of these (noclobber, vi-mode, a version of history-expansion) aren't peculiar to zsh. You can happily use them in
bash
and probably other shells.I've never come across the 'global aliases' though. I think they sound like they'd confuse my brain!