Oh My ZSH! with autosuggestions and syntax-highlighting

Prerequisites

This tutorial works for Linux and macOS systems.

For the next instructions to work the following packages must be installed:

• zsh
• curl
• git
• vim (or any other text-editor)

Oh My ZSH!

First, let’s install Oh-My-ZSH.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Alternatively you could use the method provided at https://ohmyz.sh/#install.

Plugins

Oh-My-ZSH allows us to install plugins. Two useful plugins are autosuggestions and syntax-highlighting. Both are available at https://github.com/zsh-users.

Let’s clone the autosuggestions repository.

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

Next, do the same for syntax-highlighting.

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

Furthermore, we can install a custom theme powerlevel10k.

git clone https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/powerlevel10k

Now that the two plugins and theme are downloaded, we need to add them to the file .zshrc. Using your favorite text-editor open ~/.zshrc.

vim ~/.zshrc

Within the file search for plugins=(git), and append the two new plugins as follows. Please note that the plugins are separated using spaces.

plugins=(git zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting)

When the above is added, save the file. For vim: hit ESC and then two times shift + Z.

We also need to specify the installed theme to make it go into effect.

ZSH_THEME="powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k"

To make the changes in ~/.zshrc go into effect, reopen the terminal. Alternatively to reopening the terminal, source the file.

source ~/.zshrc

Updating

Once in a while, updates will be pushed to the repositories. Pull the changes to keep the local repositories up-to-date.

cd $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions; git pull

cd $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting; git pull

This can also be done for the theme.

cd $ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/powerlevel10k; git pull

And if you would like to go reconfigure your powerlevel10k theme, do so with the following command.

p10k configure

Troubleshooting

During my experience with autosuggestion, I encountered a problem on macOS. When entering a value that can be completed using autocompletion, it would not properly complete. This issue was submitted here https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions/issues/686.

To solve this bug, make sure to put the following lines in your ~/.zshrc file.

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Don’t forget to source the file after saving it, like instructed above.