The other day, I switched my shell from bash to zsh. Just like Rafe, I read the Fried CPU post about zsh, and was convinced to give it a whirl. It’s been in the back of my mind for a while now, since I’ve notice that a lot of people whom I respect (Ryan Bates, for one) are using it, but the concise list of really powerful features in the Fried CPU article was the tipping point. I’ll admit that, never having switched shells before, I thought it was going to be a heck of a lot more complicated than just typing chsh and replacing “/bin/bash” with “/bin/zsh” in the config file that pops up. Had I known it would be that easy, I would’ve tried it a lot sooner.

At first, I tried copying huge chunks out of the zshrc & other zsh config files that Joe Ferris maintains in a repo at Github, but eventually decided I’d get more out of this experiment if I took more bite-sized chunks out of other peoples configurations, and only added them to my own when I understood what they were doing.

That’s when things got out of hand.

When I was copying bits of my old bash configs over to my zshrc, I noticed how disorganized all of my dotfiles were–not just the shell ones, but my irbrc, and vim & emacs configs, etc., etc., etc. So I basically decided to scrap all of them and take the same approach to them as I was taking with my shell configs. So basically, I’m starting over with Unix, and slowly rebuilding what I’m hoping will be a super-organized and super-optimized environment for future work and play.

If you’re interested in seeing how things develop, you can follow along with my dotfiles repo on Github. But what I’m sure will be infinitely more interesting will be to start on your own adventure in Unix configuration. If you go down that road, here are some of the resources I’ve used in rebuilding my environment:

• Joe Ferris’s config_files repo: I mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again, due to its being awesome.
• dotfiles.org: User-conributed dotfiles for just about every *nix-based utility that uses a text-based configuration file.
• irb & script/console tips: Obviously these are only useful to Rubyists, but if you swing that way, theses are well worth checking out. Ever since I first saw the SQL generated by an ActiveRecord query show up in someone’s script/console, I’ve coveted that functionality. Dan Croak shows how it’s done.
• Dr. Nic also has some great irb tips
• Finally, I cribbed a git-aware prompt from this screencast. A very neat trick.

So yeah, it’s been really fun getting back to basics with my Unix configs. That said, I have had one small hiccup in this process. After going through all of this with my OSX terminal, I went to switch my shiny new Ubuntu JeOS VM’s shell over to zsh, but found that after doing so, my delete key wasn’t behaving like a backspace as it had been doing when I was using bash. Apparently this is a known issue when using zsh or screen over ssh. I still haven’t found a good workaround for this, and so am still using bash in Ubuntu.

All in all, switching from bash to zsh has been an extremely rewarding experience, and definitely one I’d recommend to anyone looking to change up their routine and learn something new and useful.

matt@thinkpad:~$ sudo gem install hpricot
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing hpricot:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install hpricot
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1
Gem files will remain installed in
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6 for inspection.
Results logged to
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6/ext/hpricot_scan/gem_make.out

Now what? The main problem here is that Hpricot and Mongrel both contain some C code that needs to be compiled. In order to fix this, you’ll need to install the Ruby & C development libraries for Ubuntu. To do that, just fire up Terminal and enter:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev linux-libc-dev libc6-dev

You should now be able to install Hpricot, Mongrel, or any other gem that requires you to build some C. It’s that easy!

1. They basically took everything useful out of the K menu, so it’s not clear at all how to even do anything. If it’s so confusing for someone who’s previously used KDE at some length, I shudder to think how a novice user would fare.
2. It looks so much like Aero. So much.

So, whatever. I kind of hated it. However, I’m a semi-devout GNOME/Aqua user, and I’ve got my desktop tweaked so I can wring every last drop of screaming productivity out of it. Maybe try the new KDE for yourself. YMMV.

If you do want to get it going on your system, and you’re running Ubuntu (or prolly any Debian-based distro), you can use this tutorial.