Adam's zsh page

zsh is a great UNIX shell. It has all the benefits of other standard shells, and a hell of a lot more on top. I'm interested in the interactive features in particular, because they can save you a lot of time and effort.

Why bother with zsh?

OK, here's some of the really cool stuff. A few of the other shells have some of these features, although in general zsh does it more comprehensively.

Versions of zsh

Confused about the various versions of zsh available? Here's a quick summary:

4.0.4
The latest stable release, at the time of writing. You can always get the latest stable version from zsh's file area on sourceforge.net.
SourceForge CVS
The latest development tree is available via CVS from sourceforge.net. zsh also has a project home page on this site.
4.1.x-dev-y
The latest official development release branch, at the time of writing. These are official intermediate development versions compiled by Peter Stephenson (pws) from patches selected from zsh-workers and committed to the HEAD branch in CVS. They are sometimes released once a week, sometimes less often, and are available in the development subdirectory of your local mirror site; see www.zsh.org to find out which mirror site is nearest to you.)

If you were to put them on a scale, it would be something like this:

    4.x.y, x even    4.x.y, x odd    intermediate devel        CVS at
    (e.g. 4.0.2)     (e.g. 4.1.0)    releases (dev, pws)   sourceforge.net

  <------------------------------------------------------------------------>

    least often released /                          most often released /
    most stable                                     most bleeding edge   

Other resources

Other bits'n'pieces available:

Peter Stephenson has written an excellent, user-friendly user's guide to zsh which is very helpful for those who really want to get to grips with the power features of zsh.


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Last updated: Tue Feb 3 15:01:00 2004
© 1995-2003 Adam Spiers <adam@spiers.net>