Ahmad Awais

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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! ✌️

Founder & CEO at Langbase.com · Ex VP DevRel Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 🧑‍💻 AI/ML/DevTools Angel InvestorAI/ML Advisory Board member 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 3x 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 (100 videos · 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K 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.
🙌 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.