Tip o' the Week

So you get a new toy and you love it and it has a wonderful, whiz-bang feature you use every day. The toy has a bunch of other features, but when you read the manual, you realize you just can't remember it all.

Of course, to really use zsh or git or insert toy here, you need to spend time learning it before you need it. So, I'm going to see if I can write a tip o' the week of some cool, but perhaps obscure feature that I didn't know before.

I'm going to begin by concentrating on Zshell, since this looks quite powerful, but I'm just now starting to level up on it. Perhaps my discoveries will be helpful for others…

Then again, I don't care much since I'm already a level 5 dual-blade elf zshuser with a +1 prompt, and this exercise is good for me.

zsh: OSX Module
What is in the "osx" module that comes with oh-my-zsh? Let's take a look.

zsh: Bang History Word Substitution
I've been happy with Ctrl-R and the up-arrow to get to my command history, but word substitution makes we want to use the bang in zsh.

zsh: More Word Expansion
Zshell has modifiers for the parameter (word) designators I mentioned last time. Let's look at some of these.

zsh: Precommands and a Better Find
A precommand is a shell instruction that affects how the rest of the command line behaves. Zshell's nifty 'noglob' worked well for aliases.

zsh: The Git Module
How many times do you type 'git status' or 'git add --update'? Perhaps an alias or two is in order?

Emacs E-Shell
How to get your aliases working in Emacs' pretty cool Eshell.