I often launch a long running command (e.g. a build or firmware upgrade), then wander off to another virtual desktop to take care of a few small tasks while I'm waiting for the command to complete. Unfortunately those "little tasks" tend to suck me in and I forget ...

Building an RSS reader must be some kind of rite of passage. Everybody has probably started one at one point. (Hey, I've done it too.) It seems easy enough, right? Unfortunately, it is pretty easy to get something sort-of working. Which means that there's a lot of junk ...

Since the beginning of time, all the cool kids have had really cool shell prompts. It's a great place to display helpful information, and zsh has features that let you have a flexible, informative, unobtrusive prompt.

Set your prompt by setting $PROMPT. If you do PROMPT='foo ', the shell ...

Snippet from my .zshrc:

# This controls what the line editor considers a word. By default it
# includes '/', which makes it so that when I M-del (attempting to erase
# a directory in a path), I erase the whole path. Annoying.
# WORDCHARS='*?_-.[]~=/&;!#$%^(){}<>' # (default)
WORDCHARS='*?_-.[]~=&;!#$%^(){}<>'`

After living with this for a ...

To get started:

1. sudo aptitude install zsh
2. chsh /bin/zsh

That's pretty simple.

Of course, you're not running zsh yet... either logout and log back in or just run zsh at the prompt. You'll get a series of prompts to configure a .zshrc. It only takes a ...