VP of Developer Relations (DevRel, DX Eng., Dev Content Docs). I'm Hiring!
Helping businesses build developer-led adoption for 15+ yrs.
Copyright © Ahmad Awais 2003 - 2025. All rights reserved.
Proudly published with WordPress & hosted with Kinsta.
Terms • Privacy • Disclaimer
Contact 
Newsletter 
RSS Feed
Courses 
Talks 
Uses 
Press
Learn automation build Node.js CLI
Become a VSCode Power User
Who is Ahmad Awais?
Ahmad Awais
I’m a command-line power-user. I do more things with command line than I probably should. So, I have built a lot of small workflows to help me with daily stuff.
For example, Command-Line ZSH Syntax Highlighting is a total win. It helps me visualize if I am about to run a dangerous command rm -rf * (anyone?) — and also if a program exists in the $PATH or not.
Syntax highlight in ZSH is awesome. It highlights what you’re tying in real time.
red.green.To use it, clone zsh-syntax-highlighting from Github and add the following commands to your .zshrc. They’ll enable the common highlighters, and add a warning highlight when you try and use rm -rf.
| #.# zsh-syntax-highlighting | |
| # | |
| # Fish shell like syntax highlighting for Zsh | |
| # | |
| # @link: http://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting | |
| source ~/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh | |
| ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_HIGHLIGHTERS=(main brackets pattern cursor) | |
| ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_PATTERNS=('rm -rf *' 'fg=white,bold,bg=red') # To have commands starting with `rm -rf` in red: |
Happy hacking. Peace! 
Creator of CHAI.new — vibe code ai agents · Founder & CEO of Langbase.com — The most powerful serverless AI agents developer platform to build, deploy, and scale AI agents with tools and memory · Check out the State of AI Agents.
Ex VP DevTools & DevRel Eng. Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 
AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork
Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 
Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 
NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 
8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).
Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation and VSCode.pro course. Over 142 million views, 24 yrs Blogging, 108K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.
Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide ⓦ WordPress Core Developer 
TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.
As quoted by: Satya Nadella · CEO of Microsoft — Awais is an awesome example for developers.
Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.
… Awais is mostly active on 𝕏 @MrAhmadAwais
Stay ahead in the web dev community with Ahmad's expert insights on open-source, developer relations, dev-tools, and side-hustles. Insider-email-only-content. Don't miss out - subscirbe for a dose of professional advice and a dash of humor. No spam, pinky-promise!
172,438 Developers Already Subscribed
by
Hi Ahmad,
zshis cool. You might also like skwp.github.io/dotfiles/ (YADR). It uses Prezto github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto and the ZSH Syntax Highlighting is incorporated by Prezto.YADR has a lot of neat git aliases and tweaks for Homebrew. Also, a very useful
vimrcfile if you use vim. Just the aliases are worth a look.I switched to
YADRsome time ago fromOh My ZSHand it’s noticeably faster.Mentions