Setup Zsh + Powerline on Solus

Have you asked yourself ? What is Zsh ? And why should I use it ? If yes, I will answer you briefly.

The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of Bash, ksh, and tcsh. 

Zsh Features

• The z-command

With the z command, you can navigate to a frequently/recently visited directory just by typing z , followed by the directory name.

• Auto-completion

You can just type the command, followed by -, then hit tab. This action will then immediately display all of the available options for that command.

• Auto-correction

In the Z shell, if you make an innocent typo while writing a file location, for example, spell correction is built-in and will automatically detect the typo.

• Color customization

Zsh add color highlighting to directories. Additionally, the font-weight will be slightly bolder. This is extremely helpful to see what’s a file and what’s a directory.

• And Many Other features : Read more on this link :
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_shell#Features

If you are using Solus and you decided to switch your shell from bash to Zsh. Follow me as I will show you how to Setup Zsh + Powerline on Solus.

Steps

• Setup Zsh
  

1. Install Zsh: sudo eopkg it zsh
   
2. Change shell: sudo chsh -s /bin/zsh $(whoami)
   
3. Log out and back in again for the change to take effect.
   
4. A configuration dialog will be showed up when you open the terminal so read the instruction carefully to configure it depending on your preferences
   

• After setting up Zsh let’s make our shell more powerful by installing Powerline.
  

• Setup Powerline
  

1. Install Powerline: sudo eopkg it powerline powerline-fonts

2. Add powerline-daemon -q to the zshrc file : 

   echo "powerline-daemon -q" >> ~/.zshrc

3. Add source /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh to the zshrc file:
   

echo "source /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc

• Close the terminal & relaunch it.

Enjoy  Zsh & Powerline 👊.