Moving Back to ZSH

After using bash for about a year now, I've decided to try zsh again. To do this, I began by opening up the zsh page on the trusty Arch Linux wiki to use as a starting guide.

I installed zsh with pacman -S zsh, set my default shell to zsh from bash with chsh -s $(which zsh), and ran zsh to ensure it worked. I followed the configuration guide provided at the initial run of zsh, choosing mostly default settings.

I wanted to try powerline, so I decided to install the powerline-shell by milkbikis so I could use it.

Powerline requires a patched font for Unicode symbols, and I like using terminus, so I performed the following steps to get the patched Terminus font (known as Terminess):

• Clone powerline-fonts
• Copy Terminus/ directory to ~/.fonts/
• Run fc-cache -vf ~/.fonts
• Updated my .Xresources (may be your .Xdefaults) with URxvt*font: xft:Terminess\ Powerline:pixelsize=12
• Reloaded my X settings with xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

In addition to my base16-resources chalk rxvt colour scheme, I also had to define one for zsh, using base16-shell.

I then migrated my .bashrc and other bash configuration files to their zsh counterparts.

I like using the Home and End keys to go to the first and last input columns, and I expect that to be the default behaviour in my shell. Because I chose vim keybindings for my install (I am trying to slowly learn them), this was a bit of a conflict, so to remedy it I followed the zsh key bindings instructions on the Arch wiki.

In .zshrc, I added all of my bash aliases, and added the following line to startx on boot:

[[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec startx

So far, this is the end result:

I hope to further improve on it in the near future.