Yay, Refining Linux got a face-lift!
This blog has now been up for a good one and a half year and nothing has changed much since it started. Now it's time to give it a redesign (if you ask me, this was long overdue). While the main appearance stays the same, the details have changed significantly. Let me walk you through the new goodies.
Tomorrow this blog will be blacked out for 12 hours starting at 1400 CET (1300 UTC or 8 AM EST).
With this initiative Refining Linux is following the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) proposed by US legislators and the media industry. Many huge Internet companies and organizations such as Reddit and Wikipedia participate in these protests. Also companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and of course non-profit organizations such as Mozilla and many smaller groups support the protests against SOPA and PIPA.
I have shown you many things about ZSH throughout this series, but there is much more you can do with it than I could cover here. And of course there is also much more to configure, many more options I couldn't tell you about, many more tips and tricks, tweaks and optimizations.
Generally, it's a long way to go before you have your shell set up as you like. Especially ZSH needs a lot of configuration before it becomes very user-friendly. You can do all this configuration by hand or you can use a framework for that. Yes, there are frameworks for ZSH (and for Bash as well, in case you didn't know) and as a completion of this Advent series I'll show you two of them.
There are two ZSH modules which allow you to easily work with POSIX extended regular expressions (POSIX ERE) or with Perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE) which are even more advanced than POSIX ERE. These two modules are zsh/regex and zsh/pcre. You can use either one of them or both at the same time. That's entirely up to you. I'll show you both.
Working on the shell is often working with files and sometimes you need to read or edit their contents. Normally you'd do that with the command line editor of your choice (e.g. nano, vi, vim or emacs), but sometimes you need to write the output of a command or a pipe to a file or feed programs with contents from the hard disk. That's usually done by using the input and output redirection operators, but ZSH gives you one more tool which can sometimes make things easier. This module is called mapfile.
Yesterday I told you about how to use the full potential of the cd command. Today I want to go one step further and show you how you can reduce the number of characters to type even more.
As I've already shown you several times throughout this series, ZSH is very capable of completing things when hitting the TAB key. Today I'll show you two more features concerning completion of abbreviated or incomplete pathnames.
I guess, the cd command is the most often neglected command. Nobody really cares about what this command can do, but in fact, ZSH has added some magic to it, which makes it worth a more thorough look.
I told you about AUTO_CD before, a shorthand syntax for the cd command. But that's not the only thing ZSH has done to cd.
I guess each shell implementation knows something like aliases. With aliases you can give commands different names which might be more convenient for you. That's nothing new, but ZSH has a feature called global aliases.
In ZSH you can easily perform regexp search and replace operations on shell parameters. The only function you need for this is regexp-replace.
Regexp search and replace can be very useful when writing shell scripts which need to process input data, directory names, process trees etc. You assign the string which you need to work on to a parameter and then run the replace function on it.
This is probably the shortest tip of this series. I only want to show you a ZSH-specific shorthand for changing directories.
The ZSH option AUTO_CD makes it possible to change directories by just writing their names without using cd. This might be interesting for those of you who always want to type as few characters as possible.
