Moving to Zsh on OSX in 2019

Sep 6, 2019

Note: Before you follow these instructions, see Postscript at the end.

I have a long and twisted relationship with nix shells. My computing history started on 8 bit boxes where the was close to no shell (just Basic) and then transitioned to DOS. I moved to Unix initially in 88 (Sun 3s) and then went to Linux full time in '99 and OSX finally in 2005. And despite all that, I still struggle with *nix shells; my prompt is never right, my shell scripting blows chunks, etc. Sigh. But the one thing I hate, hate, hate, *censored hate is that with Bash, my history is always screwed up. I actually like Bash a bit but I am so damn tired of every Bash session on my machine having a different history and each terminal window racing in a Darwinian competition of "let my history win!".

Just to clarify, in a terminal your history is the list of commands that you executed. And since the types of commands I issue can be frighteningly complex, I want access to all my previous commands - period. I'm absolutely binary on this issue, access to all your commands is a good thing. And commands being lost is a bad thing; a censoreding bad thing.

My good friend Sean and regular pairing partner, Sean Kennedy, told me that Z-Shell solves this and, when I had an opportunity, I was ready for it. Here's the short process:

1. Close everything.
2. Install Mojave if you haven't (yes I'm antiquatedly retro in the speed by which I upgrade operating systems; sorry / not sorry).
3. Install Z Shell with Home Brew
4. Install Oh My Zsh which makes ZShell so much better
5. Execute a change shell command
6. Update Your .zshrc File
7. Log out and then in on your Mac. Yes this shouldn't be necessary but #$(#$*# Apple.

Steps 3 forward are covered below.

3 - Install Z Shell with Home Brew

Execute this:

brew install zsh

4- Install Oh My Zsh

Execute this command:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

5 - Change Your Shell

You may find that installing Oh My Zsh changes your shell. If it doesn't then you need to do this:

chsh -s $(which zsh)

And then a:

ln -s "$ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/spaceship-prompt/spaceship.zsh-theme" "$ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/spaceship.zsh-theme"

6 - Update Your .zshrc

The file .zshrc is your zsh configuration file. Edit it as follows:

1. Open this file in an editor.
2. Comment out the robbyrussell theme line by prefixing it with a # character.
3. Add the following lines after the robbyrussell theme line (change the username csphere to your own).

Here are the changes to make:

# Oh My Zsh
export SPACESHIP_GIT_SYMBOL=''
export SPACESHIP_PACKAGE_SYMBOL='package '
export SPACESHIP_NODE_SYMBOL='node '
export SPACESHIP_RUBY_SYMBOL='ruby '
export SPACESHIP_ELIXIR_SYMBOL='elixir '
export SPACESHIP_XCODE_SYMBOL='xcode '
export SPACESHIP_SWIFT_SYMBOL='swift '
export SPACESHIP_GOLANG_SYMBOL='go '
export SPACESHIP_PHP_SYMBOL='php '
export SPACESHIP_RUST_SYMBOL='rust '
export SPACESHIP_DOCKER_SYMBOL='docker '
export SPACESHIP_AWS_SYMBOL='aws '
export ZSH=/Users/csphere/.oh-my-zsh
ZSH_THEME="spaceship"
ZSH_CUSTOM=~/.zsh-custom/
plugins=(
  git
)
source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

A Slack Conversation About This

scott.johnson [9:26 AM]
So I just tried to search my history and am I doing it right:

history | grep ssh
  69* ssh 172.31.21.29

that’s not showing the ssh line I got from you to get into jenkins which concerns me about the command line history.  Am I doing something wrong?

So I found it by looking in ~/.zsh_history

Sean Kennedy [9:32 AM]
edit your zsh history
err
edit your zshrc

scott.johnson [9:33 AM]
ok…

Sean Kennedy [9:33 AM]
```HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history
SAVEHIST=100000```
then source it
will probably need to source it in every active terminal

scott.johnson [9:33 AM]
thx man

Sean Kennedy [9:33 AM]
np

Postscript

So I just tried to follow this exactly on a new machine and it both worked and didn’t work. It worked in the terminal window where I started but it failed in any new window. I think the issue amounted to:

• On OSX Mojave after a chsh operation you need to log out and log back in. My guess is that this one thing fixes everything but just in case, follow the next steps.

• I needed (perhaps) a bootstrap shell script called ~/sourcezsh.sh which has in it only three lines:

  #!/bin/bash # adjust as needed export ZSH=/Users/sjohnson/.oh-my-zsh source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

In the event that this fails for you then here are the links which helped me sort it out:

Note: I’d have solved this more definitively but my machine is rebuilding a 100gig archive of hate speech for data processing and, well, I simply can’t log in and out right now. Sigh.

And I wouldn't have posted this except that it mostly worked and I needed it myself to move forward. Still I hate like hell that it is ambiguous. Sorry.

References

• Rick Cogley