zshroadmap(1) - man - phpMan

ZSHROADMAP(1)                          General Commands Manual                         ZSHROADMAP(1)



NAME
       zshroadmap  -  informal introduction to the zsh manual The Zsh Manual, like the shell itself,
       is large and often complicated.  This section of the manual provides some pointers  to  areas
       of  the  shell that are likely to be of particular interest to new users, and indicates where
       in the rest of the manual the documentation is to be found.

WHEN THE SHELL STARTS
       When it starts, the shell reads commands from various files.  These can be created or  edited
       to customize the shell.  See the section Startup/Shutdown Files in zsh(1).

       If no personal initialization files exist for the current user, a function is run to help you
       change some of the most common settings.  It won't appear if your administrator has  disabled
       the  zsh/newuser module.  The function is designed to be self-explanatory.  You can run it by
       hand with `autoload -Uz zsh-newuser-install; zsh-newuser-install -f'.  See also  the  section
       User Configuration Functions in zshcontrib(1).

INTERACTIVE USE
       Interaction  with  the shell uses the builtin Zsh Line Editor, ZLE.  This is described in de‐
       tail in zshzle(1).

       The first decision a user must make is whether to use the Emacs or Vi  editing  mode  as  the
       keys  for  editing  are substantially different.  Emacs editing mode is probably more natural
       for beginners and can be selected explicitly with the command bindkey -e.

       A history mechanism for retrieving previously typed lines (most simply with the  Up  or  Down
       arrow  keys) is available; note that, unlike other shells, zsh will not save these lines when
       the shell exits unless you set appropriate variables, and the number  of  history  lines  re‐
       tained by default is quite small (30 lines).  See the description of the shell variables (re‐
       ferred to in the documentation as parameters) HISTFILE, HISTSIZE and SAVEHIST in zshparam(1).
       Note  that it's currently only possible to read and write files saving history when the shell
       is interactive, i.e. it does not work from scripts.

       The shell now supports the UTF-8 character set (and also others if supported by the operating
       system).   This  is (mostly) handled transparently by the shell, but the degree of support in
       terminal emulators is variable.   There  is  some  discussion  of  this  in  the  shell  FAQ,
       http://www.zsh.org/FAQ/.   Note in particular that for combining characters to be handled the
       option COMBINING_CHARS needs to be set.  Because the shell is now more sensitive to the defi‐
       nition  of  the  character  set,  note that if you are upgrading from an older version of the
       shell you should ensure that the appropriate variable, either LANG (to affect all aspects  of
       the  shell's operation) or LC_CTYPE (to affect only the handling of character sets) is set to
       an appropriate value.  This is true even if you are using a single-byte character set includ‐
       ing  extensions  of ASCII such as ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15.  See the description of LC_CTYPE
       in zshparam(1).

   Completion
       Completion is a feature present in many shells. It allows the user to type only a part  (usu‐
       ally the prefix) of a word and have the shell fill in the rest.  The completion system in zsh
       is programmable.  For example, the shell can be set to complete email addresses in  arguments
       to  the  mail  command  from your ~/.abook/addressbook; usernames, hostnames, and even remote
       paths in arguments to scp, and so on.  Anything that can be written in or glued together with
       zsh can be the source of what the line editor offers as possible completions.

       Zsh has two completion systems, an old, so called compctl completion (named after the builtin
       command that serves as its complete and only user interface), and a new one, referred  to  as
       compsys,  organized as library of builtin and user-defined functions.  The two systems differ
       in their interface for specifying the completion behavior.  The new system is more customiza‐
       ble  and  is supplied with completions for many commonly used commands; it is therefore to be
       preferred.

       The completion system must be enabled explicitly when the shell starts.  For more information
       see zshcompsys(1).

   Extending the line editor
       Apart  from  completion,  the  line  editor is highly extensible by means of shell functions.
       Some useful functions are provided with the shell; they provide facilities such as:

       insert-composed-char
              composing characters not found on the keyboard

       match-words-by-style
              configuring what the line editor considers a word when moving or deleting by word

       history-beginning-search-backward-end, etc.
              alternative ways of searching the shell history

       replace-string, replace-pattern
              functions for replacing strings or patterns globally in the command line

       edit-command-line
              edit the command line with an external editor.

       See the section `ZLE Functions' in zshcontrib(1) for descriptions of these.

OPTIONS
       The shell has a large number of options for changing its behaviour.  These cover all  aspects
       of  the shell; browsing the full documentation is the only good way to become acquainted with
       the many possibilities.  See zshoptions(1).

PATTERN MATCHING
       The shell has a rich set of patterns which are available for file matching (described in  the
       documentation  as  `filename generation' and also known for historical reasons as `globbing')
       and for use when programming.  These are described in the section  `Filename  Generation'  in
       zshexpn(1).

       Of  particular  interest  are the following patterns that are not commonly supported by other
       systems of pattern matching:

       **     for matching over multiple directories

       |      for matching either of two alternatives

       ~, ^   the ability to exclude patterns from matching when the EXTENDED_GLOB option is set

       (...)  glob qualifiers, included in parentheses at the end of the pattern, which select files
              by type (such as directories) or attribute (such as size).

GENERAL COMMENTS ON SYNTAX
       Although  the syntax of zsh is in ways similar to the Korn shell, and therefore more remotely
       to the original UNIX shell, the Bourne shell, its default behaviour does not entirely  corre‐
       spond  to those shells.  General shell syntax is introduced in the section `Shell Grammar' in
       zshmisc(1).

       One commonly encountered difference is that variables substituted onto the command  line  are
       not  split  into words.  See the description of the shell option SH_WORD_SPLIT in the section
       `Parameter Expansion' in zshexpn(1).  In zsh, you can either explicitly request the splitting
       (e.g. ${=foo}) or use an array when you want a variable to expand to more than one word.  See
       the section `Array Parameters' in zshparam(1).

PROGRAMMING
       The most convenient way of adding enhancements to the shell is typically by writing  a  shell
       function  and  arranging  for  it  to  be autoloaded.  Functions are described in the section
       `Functions' in zshmisc(1).  Users changing from the C shell and its relatives  should  notice
       that  aliases  are  less used in zsh as they don't perform argument substitution, only simple
       text replacement.

       A few general functions, other than those for the line editor described above,  are  provided
       with the shell and are described in zshcontrib(1).  Features include:

       promptinit
              a prompt theme system for changing prompts easily, see the section `Prompt Themes'


       zsh-mime-setup
              a  MIME-handling system which dispatches commands according to the suffix of a file as
              done by graphical file managers

       zcalc  a calculator

       zargs  a version of xargs that makes the find command redundant

       zmv    a command for renaming files by means of shell patterns.



zsh 5.8.1                                 February 12, 2022                            ZSHROADMAP(1)