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Ahmad Awais

VP of Developer Relations (DevRel, DX Eng., Dev Content Docs). I'm Hiring!
Helping businesses build developer-led adoption for 15+ yrs.

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Command-Line ZSH Syntax Highlighting Is Dope!

Ahmad AwaisAhmad 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.

zsh-syntax-highlight

Syntax highlight in ZSH is awesome. It highlights what you’re tying in real time.

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.

Happy hacking. Peace! ✌️

DevOps

Helping businesses build developer-led adoption for 10+ yrs.
VP of Developer Relations and Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member.

📟 Edutainer at Node.js CLI Automation course (100 videos · 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 36K devs learning. 🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 🚀 Mars Ingenuity Helicopter code contributor 🏆 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient 🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator.

✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries used 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.
🙌 Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade 💜 Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

👋… Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais

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Comments 1
  • noelspringer
    Posted on

    noelspringer noelspringer

    Reply Author

    Hi Ahmad, zsh is 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 vimrc file if you use vim. Just the aliases are worth a look.

    I switched to YADR some time ago from Oh My ZSH and it’s noticeably faster.