ohmyzsh VS zsh-syntax-highlighting

The first tool I always install is OhMyZsh.

That's it! Happy CLI mastery with Zellij, Oh My zsh and Alacritty!

Step 2: Setting Up Oh My ZSH

If you are using Oh My ZSH as your shell of choice, you can add plugins=(... aws ) to your .zshrc / profile and besides having autocomplete for the AWS CLI you will also immediately see in the terminal window what is the current AWS profile you are logged in.

Good news if you use zsh: just type history -i

I've mentioned above that I've been using robbyrussell (from here) for my iTerm2 terminal setup, so I wondered if the same one is available. I was about to start googling the list of available topics, but I've noticed a hint in the Ghostty doc to run ghostty +list-themes in the terminal, and here is what has happened:

ZSH and Oh My ZSH offer superpowers to your terminal thanks to its customization and wide variety of plugins.

I made that exact thought many years ago and came to the direct opposite conclusion. It was worth the cognitive overhead to make the change and I haven't looked back. Most of the time I'm just hitting aliases (from OMZ's git plugin) https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/master/plugins/git e.g.

    gsw  git switch

Zsh + Oh My Zsh Zsh + Oh My Zsh (OMZ) is a powerful and highly customizable shell setup. Zsh is an advanced shell that enhances the default bash experience with features like better autocompletion, improved scripting, and a more user-friendly syntax. Oh My Zsh is a framework that simplifies the management of Zsh configurations by providing a large collection of plugins, themes, and additional features. It helps improve your terminal productivity with tools like autocompletion for Git, Docker, Kubernetes, and more, while also offering eye-catching themes and an easy-to-manage configuration system. github

Installing oh-my-zsh-nvm plugin (when zsh is in use)

# 1. Backup existing configuration cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.backup 2>/dev/null || echo "No existing ~/.zshrc" # 2. Install Homebrew /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" # 3. Install iTerm2 brew install --cask iterm2 # 4. Install Oh My Zsh sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)" # 5. Install Powerlevel10k theme git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k sed -i '' 's/ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"/ZSH_THEME="powerlevel10k\/powerlevel10k"/' ~/.zshrc # 6. Install essential plugins git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting brew install autojump # 7. Restart terminal or reload configuration source ~/.zshrc

zsh can compile zsh scripts using the builtin zcompile into wordcode. This will have the effect of having faster parsing. The way we use this to get a faster prompt is to explicitly ask zsh to compile certain chunky plugins(think your syntax highlighters and completion plugins) into wordcode.

Lastly, let’s make what commands we’re running easier to read, using zsh-syntax-highlighting. This script (which must be loaded before the zsh-history-substring-search above) will provide syntax highlighting of commands as you write them. This will help you avoid typos for incorrect commands, and make complex commands easier to read.

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions && git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting && git clone https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/fast-syntax-highlighting && git clone --depth 1 -- https://github.com/marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autocomplete

brew install fzf # for fuzzy find files, commands, etc brew install starship $(brew --prefix)/opt/fzf/install git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting # syntax highlight for zsh git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions # smart autosuggestions for zsh echo 'eval "$(starship init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

# run this git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting $ZSH/custom/zsh-syntax-highlighting # add this to your .zshrc plugin=(... zsh-syntax-highlighting)

$ git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting $ git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

sudo git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git echo "source ${(q-)PWD}/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh" >> ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zshrc

Two by far the most popular plugins are zsh-syntax-highlighting and zsh-autosuggestions. They are of high quality and quite useful.