Z shell (Zsh)
An interactive shell with extensive customisation and completion.
Zsh is an interactive shell that draws on Bash, ksh, and tcsh, and adds features oriented towards day-to-day terminal use: programmable tab completion that understands the arguments of thousands of commands, glob qualifiers (path expansions with filtering predicates), spelling correction, a flexible prompt system with right-side prompts and right-aligned components, and shared history across multiple shell sessions.
Zsh has been the default login shell on macOS since version 10.15 (2019), which substantially raised its profile in the wider Unix world. The Oh My Zsh community framework, started by Robby Russell in 2009, bundles themes, plugins, and configuration into a single git-clone-and-source setup that has made Zsh the dominant choice among developers who customise their shell heavily. Powerlevel10k extended this further with faster prompts and more options.
Paul Falstad created Zsh in 1990 while at Princeton. The Zsh development group has maintained it ever since under an MIT- style licence. Zsh has the largest "interactive features" set of any common shell — fish has a smaller, more opinionated variant; Bash has many features but in a more austere form. The trade-off is configuration overhead, which the framework ecosystem largely solves.
Install
Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install zsh Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install zsh Arch: sudo pacman -S zsh macOS: already preinstalled
Authors
- Paul Falstad (creator, 1990)
- Zsh development group