ZSHROADMAP(1)						      General Commands Manual						     ZSHROADMAP(1)

NAME

       zshroadmap - informal introduction to the zsh manual

       The  Zsh  Manual, like the shell itself, is large and often complicated.  This section of the manual provides some pointers to areas of the
       shell that are likely to be of particular interest to new users, and indicates where in the rest of the manual the documentation is  to	be
       found.

WHEN THE SHELL STARTS

       When  it  starts,  the  shell  reads  commands from various files.  These can be created or edited to customize the shell.  See the section
       Startup/Shutdown Files in zsh(1).

       If no personal initialization files exist for the current user, a function is run to help you change some of the most common settings.	It
       won't  appear  if your administrator has disabled the zsh/newuser module.  The function is designed to be self-explanatory.  You can run it
       by hand with `autoload -Uz zsh-newuser-install; zsh-newuser-install -f'.  See also the section  User  Configuration  Functions  in  zshcon-
       trib(1).

INTERACTIVE USE

       Interaction with the shell uses the builtin Zsh Line Editor, ZLE.  This is described in detail in zshzle(1).

       The  first  decision  a	user must make is whether to use the Emacs or Vi editing mode as the keys for editing are substantially different.
       Emacs editing mode is probably more natural for beginners and can be selected explicitly with the command bindkey -e.

       A history mechanism for retrieving previously typed lines (most simply with the Up or Down arrow keys)  is  available;  note  that,  unlike
       other  shells,  zsh  will  not  save these lines when the shell exits unless you set appropriate variables, and the number of history lines
       retained by default is quite small (30 lines).  See the description of the shell variables (referred to in the documentation as parameters)
       HISTFILE, HISTSIZE and SAVEHIST in zshparam(1).

       The  shell now supports the UTF-8 character set (and also others if supported by the operating system).	This is (mostly) handled transpar-
       ently by the shell, but the degree of support in terminal emulators is variable.  There is some	discussion  of	this  in  the  shell  FAQ,
       http://zsh.dotsrc.org/FAQ/  .   Note  in particular that for combining characters to be handled the option COMBINING_CHARS needs to be set.
       Because the shell is now more sensitive to the definition of the character set, note that if you are upgrading from an older version of the
       shell  you should ensure that the appropriate variable, either LANG (to affect all aspects of the shell's operation) or LC_CTYPE (to affect
       only the handling of character sets) is set to an appropriate value.  This is true even if  you	are  using  a  single-byte  character  set
       including extensions of ASCII such as ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15.  See the description of LC_CTYPE in zshparam(1).

   Completion
       Completion  is  a  feature present in many shells. It allows the user to type only a part (usually the prefix) of a word and have the shell
       fill in the rest.  The completion system in zsh is programmable.  For example, the shell can be set to complete email  addresses  in  argu-
       ments to the mail command from your ~/.abook/addressbook; usernames, hostnames, and even remote paths in arguments to scp, and so on.  Any-
       thing that can be written in or glued together with zsh can be the source of what the line editor offers as possible completions.

       Zsh has two completion systems, an old, so called compctl completion (named after the builtin command that serves as its complete and  only
       user interface), and a new one, referred to as compsys, organized as library of builtin and user-defined functions.  The two systems differ
       in their interface for specifying the completion behavior.  The new system is more customizable and is supplied with completions  for  many
       commonly used commands; it is therefore to be preferred.

       The completion system must be enabled explicitly when the shell starts.	For more information see zshcompsys(1).

   Extending the line editor
       Apart  from  completion,  the  line  editor  is highly extensible by means of shell functions.  Some useful functions are provided with the
       shell; they provide facilities such as:

       insert-composed-char
	      composing characters not found on the keyboard

       match-words-by-style
	      configuring what the line editor considers a word when moving or deleting by word

       history-beginning-search-backward-end, etc.
	      alternative ways of searching the shell history

       replace-string, replace-pattern
	      functions for replacing strings or patterns globally in the command line

       edit-command-line
	      edit the command line with an external editor.

       See the section `ZLE Functions' in zshcontrib(1) for descriptions of these.

OPTIONS

       The shell has a large number of options for changing its behaviour.  These cover all aspects of the shell; browsing the full  documentation
       is the only good way to become acquainted with the many possibilities.  See zshoptions(1).

PATTERN MATCHING

       The  shell  has	a  rich set of patterns which are available for file matching (described in the documentation as `filename generation' and
       also known for historical reasons as `globbing') and for use when programming.  These are described in the section `Filename Generation' in
       zshexpn(1).

       Of particular interest are the following patterns that are not commonly supported by other systems of pattern matching:

       **     for matching over multiple directories

       ~, ^   the ability to exclude patterns from matching when the EXTENDED_GLOB option is set

       (...)  glob  qualifiers,  included  in parentheses at the end of the pattern, which select files by type (such as directories) or attribute
	      (such as size).

GENERAL COMMENTS ON SYNTAX

       Although the syntax of zsh is in ways similar to the Korn shell, and therefore more remotely to the original UNIX shell, the Bourne  shell,
       its  default  behaviour does not entirely correspond to those shells.  General shell syntax is introduced in the section `Shell Grammar' in
       zshmisc(1).

       One commonly encountered difference is that variables substituted onto the command line are not split into words.  See the  description	of
       the shell option SH_WORD_SPLIT in the section `Parameter Expansion' in zshexpn(1).  In zsh, you can either explicitly request the splitting
       (e.g. ${=foo}) or use an array when you want a variable to expand to more than one word.   See  the  section  `Array  Parameters'  in  zsh-
       param(1).

PROGRAMMING

       The most convenient way of adding enhancements to the shell is typically by writing a shell function and arranging for it to be autoloaded.
       Functions are described in the section `Functions' in zshmisc(1).  Users changing from the C shell and its  relatives  should  notice  that
       aliases are less used in zsh as they don't perform argument substitution, only simple text replacement.

       A  few  general	functions,  other than those for the line editor described above, are provided with the shell and are described in zshcon-
       trib(1).  Features include:

       promptinit
	      a prompt theme system for changing prompts easily, see the section `Prompt Themes'

       zsh-mime-setup
	      a MIME-handling system which dispatches commands according to the suffix of a file as done by graphical file managers

       zcalc  a calculator

       zargs  a version of xargs that makes the find command redundant

       zmv    a command for renaming files by means of shell patterns.

zsh 4.3.10							   June 1, 2009 						     ZSHROADMAP(1)