Zsh

Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter. While being compatible with the POSIX sh (not by default, only if issuing emulate sh), it offers advantages such as improved tab completion and globbing.

The Zsh FAQ offers more reasons to use Zsh.

Installation

See Command Shell#Changing default shell.

Configuration

Zsh can be configured with Home Manager.

Full list of home-manager options for zsh can be found here.

Example Configuration

~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix

programs.zsh = {
  enable = true;
  shellAliases = {
    ll = "ls -l";
    update = "sudo nixos-rebuild switch";
  };
  history = {
    size = 10000;
    path = "${config.xdg.dataHome}/zsh/history";
  };
};

Plugin Management

Home manager has three ways of managing plugins: Zplug, Oh-My-Zsh and manual.

Zplug

~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix

programs.zsh = {
  ... # Your zsh config
  zplug = {
    enable = true;
    plugins = [
      { name = "zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions"; } # Simple plugin installation
      { name = "romkatv/powerlevel10k"; tags = [ as:theme depth:1 ]; } # Installations with additional options. For the list of options, please refer to Zplug README.
    ];
  };
};

Oh-My-Zsh

~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix

programs.zsh = {
  ... # Your zsh config
  oh-my-zsh = {
    enable = true;
    plugins = [ "git" "thefuck" ];
    theme = "robbyrussel";
  };
};

Manual

~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix

programs.zsh = {
  ... # Your zsh config
  plugins = [
    {
      # will source zsh-autosuggestions.plugin.zsh
      name = "zsh-autosuggestions";
      src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
        owner = "zsh-users";
        repo = "zsh-autosuggestions";
        rev = "v0.4.0";
        sha256 = "0z6i9wjjklb4lvr7zjhbphibsyx51psv50gm07mbb0kj9058j6kc";
      };
    }
    {
      name = "enhancd";
      file = "init.sh";
      src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
        owner = "b4b4r07";
        repo = "enhancd";
        rev = "v2.2.1";
        sha256 = "0iqa9j09fwm6nj5rpip87x3hnvbbz9w9ajgm6wkrd5fls8fn8i5g";
      };
    }
  ];
};

Troubleshooting

Zsh-autocomplete not working

You may have some issues with the marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete plugin on NixOS. That's because the default NixOS configuration overrides keybinds for up and down arrow keys. To fix this issue, you need to add this somewhere in your .zshrc (either manually if your .zshrc is not managed by Nix, or with packages.zsh.initExtra)

bindkey "${key[Up]}" up-line-or-history

See also

• Command Shell