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Batsov
batsov.com › articles › 2025 › 03 › 01 › back-to-the-basics-zsh-without-oh-my-zsh
Back to the Basics: Zsh without Oh My Zsh | (think)
March 1, 2025 - It became clear to me I don’t really need OMZ and I quickly replaced it with a tiny custom .zshrc. Before I show you its contents, I’ll mention that I’m using Starship as my prompt, zoxide (a modern alternative to z and autojump) to move efficiently between directories, and fzf to navigate the shell history, so if you want to emulate my setup completely you’ll have to install them first.
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GitHub
github.com › agkozak › zsh-z
GitHub - agkozak/zsh-z: Jump quickly to directories that you have visited "frecently." A native Zsh port of z.sh with added features. · GitHub
Jump quickly to directories that you have visited "frecently." A native Zsh port of z.sh with added features. - agkozak/zsh-z
Starred by 2.4K users
Forked by 79 users
Languages   Shell
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Quora
quora.com › What-are-some-alternatives-to-Z-shell-ZSH
What are some alternatives to Z shell (ZSH)? - Quora
Answer: * csh - “C” Shell * tcsh - TENEX “C” shell * sh - original Borne Shell * ksh - Korn Shell * pdksh - Public Domain Korn Shell * bash - Born Again Shell * fish - Friendly Interactive Shell * sash - Stand-Alone Shell * scsh - Scheme Shell * ash - Almquist Shell * dash - Debian Alm...
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LibHunt
libhunt.com › r › zsh-z
Zsh-z Alternatives and Reviews (Jul 2023)
Which is the best alternative to zsh-z? Based on common mentions it is: Ohmyzsh, Fzf, Fish-shell, Starship, Thefuck, Powerlevel10k, Nnn, Ranger or Zsh-autosuggestions
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/suckless › what is a good alternative to zsh?
r/suckless on Reddit: What is a good alternative to Zsh?
July 10, 2022 -

Primarily looking for shells that can bind keybinds to shell functions and ease of configuration.

I am not looking to try bash or zsh as they are quite big and slow.

Currently on mksh, auto completion isn't very nice and I'm trying to do keybindings to go around that.

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StackShare
stackshare.io › zsh-zshell › alternatives
What are some alternatives to Zsh (Z shell)?
1,905 stacks0 votes9 followersCompare Zsh (Z shell) vs Gherkin →
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/commandline › what is your favorite cd tool (z, z.lua, autojump, zoxide ....) ?
r/commandline on Reddit: what is your favorite cd tool (z, z.lua, autojump, zoxide ....) ?
April 11, 2022 - https://duganchen.ca/the-simplest-autojump-implementation-for-zsh/ ... I like the Alt+C hotkey with fzf, but I often just use plain ol' cd and tab completion. ... Disclaimer: I'm the author. ... It uses fzf to provide access to bookmarks and also implements the usual z, autojump, etc functionality to cd into a directory.
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GitHub
github.com › ajeetdsouza › zoxide
GitHub - ajeetdsouza/zoxide: A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells. · GitHub
A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells. Contribute to ajeetdsouza/zoxide development by creating an account on GitHub.
Starred by 37.9K users
Forked by 842 users
Languages   Rust 82.8% | Shell 14.3% | Just 1.5% | Nix 1.4%
Find elsewhere
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/zsh › new, alternative directory-changing behavior in zsh-z
r/zsh on Reddit: New, alternative directory-changing behavior in ZSH-z
June 27, 2020 -

ZSH-z is a command line tool that allows you to jump quickly to directories that you have visited frequently in the past, or recently -- but most often a combination of the two (a concept known as "frecency"). ZSH-z is a native ZSH port of rupa/z, but it uses native ZSH features to avoid having to invoke external programs such as awk, sed, sort, date, and the like.

A new setting, ZSHZ_UNCOMMON=1, addresses a common complaint about rupa/z and ZSH-z that involves "common prefixes."

If you type z code and the best matches, in increasing order, are

/home/me/code/foo
/home/me/code/bar
/home/me/code/bat

ZSH-z will see that all possible matches share a common prefix and will send you to that directory -- /home/me/code -- which is often a desirable result. But if the possible matches are

/home/me/.vscode/foo
/home/me/code/foo
/home/me/code/bar
/home/me/code/bat

then there is no common prefix. In this case, z code will simply send you to the highest-ranking match, /home/me/code/bat.

You may enable an alternate, experimental behavior by setting ZSHZ_UNCOMMON=1. If you do that, ZSH-z will not jump to a common prefix, even if one exists. Instead, it chooses the highest-ranking match -- but it drops any subdirectories that do not include the search term. So if you type z bat and /home/me/code/bat is the best match, that is exactly where you will end up. If, however, you had typed z code and the best match was also /home/me/code/bat, you would have ended up in /home/me/code (because code was what you had searched for). This feature is still in development, and feedback is welcome.

https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z

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AlternativeTo
alternativeto.net › software › zsh
Zsh Alternatives: Top 12 Shells & Terminal Emulators | AlternativeTo
May 22, 2026 - The best Zsh alternatives are fish, GNU Bourne Again SHell and Nushell. Our crowd-sourced lists contains more than 25 apps similar to Zsh for Linux, Mac, Windows, BSD and more.
Top answer
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[iTerm2][1] is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on the recent versions of macOS. Its focus is on performance, internationalization, and supporting innovative features that make your life better, while maintaining a lot of options and settings to customize the terminal. · [1]: https://iterm2.com/[iTerm2][1] is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on the recent versions of macOS. Its focus is on performance, internationalization, and supporting innovative features that make your life better, while maintaining a lot of options and settings to customize the terminal. · [1]: https://iterm2.com/Extremely customizable: Other than being able to customize the various shortcuts, iTerm2 also lets you customize the colorscheme, font, transparency, etc. | Autocomplete is built-in: iTerm has autocomplete features built in. It remembers your past commands and when you are writing something on the terminal, simply pressing `Control-;` it will show you a drop down menu of suggestions from which to choose. | Complete out of the box: Unlike most terminal emulators, iTerm2 comes with a pretty complete set of features. It has built-in search, autocompletion, tabbed navigation, Growl support and even a built-in clipboard manager for various API keys and such. | Fine tuning for fonts: It's possible to choose a font and adjust vertical and horizontal spacing. | Can immediately open files inside a text editor: You can Ctrl+Click on a file path to open said file in a text editor. | Supports mouse actions: Has support for mouse actions like clicking, dragging, selecting, etc. | Active maintainers: Issues resolved fast by quality contributors. | Works well with powerline fonts | Completely free and open source: iTerm2 is completely free and open source. It's released under the GPLv2 license. | Split panes: Easy to split panes to either horizontal or vertical sections. Makes it easy to observe multiple console windows. | Supported by many applications as a terminal app selection: If an application has terminal integration, there is high probability it allows iTerm2 to be selected. | Intuitive | Cmd+Shift+I to Input all: Wanna SSH your server from multiple tabs, here you go. | You only need to type in commands once: iTerm2 can store up to 4M of history of commands you already used. This, coupled with the built-in search features makes it possible to type a command only once and then search for it through the history for subsequent uses. | Works perfect with Oh My Zsh: It's a perfect base to add Oh My Zsh on top of it and enjoy a lot of themes and a really pleasant look and feel. | Works well with tmux: The great mouse and clipboard support that are built-in go really well with tmux. | Any key can be mapped to any function: Using the Preferences Menu you can set up hotkeys to map virtually any action you can think of to a single key or a combination of them. This is extremely helpful as it allows you to use shortcuts to edit commands you are typing in the terminal and while most terminal emulators have shortcuts for this sort of thing, few of them let you define your own. | GPU-rendered, blazing fast and super smooth: Many people say they use Kitty or Alacritty because they are GPU-rendered. That was true a long time ago. But iTerm2 has been GPU rendered for years now. It's so fast and smooth that you soon forget you are in a terminal. | Beautiful, minimalistic and elegant UI: It's super-clean and during use it gets completely out of the way, it's a beautiful canvas for your terminal work, a pure joy that never gets old. | Can be configured as a drop-down terminal: Can be configured to work as a drop down terminal like Quake. | Cmd+D to split plane vertically: Very handy to use multi-tab. | Keycodes are not passed through following Linux standards: If you come from a Linux terminal emulator (Gnome Terminal, Konsole...) and you rely on key-combos that are widely supported in those, porting the same functionality to iTerm is possible but will require a lot of research and configuration on your part, so account for a long painful adoption period. | Not quite as fast as Alacritty or Kitty: Comparing these 3 terminals on the same machine/config, iTerm stands out as the slowest of the bunch. The difference may not be noticeable to all users. | Way too many menu items and settings: Finding the right one is like searching for a needle in a haystack. | Doesn't support Snow Leopard 10.6.8: Some people still use Snow Leopard or other 32-bit systems. | Doesn't support RTL | Lack of support for ligatures: Now some monospace typefaces (such as Hasklig and Fira Code) have support for ligatures, but it's not supported by iTerm2.
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Simple: rc is a very simple and easy to learn shell. | C-like syntax: rc has very C-like syntax, which is very helpful for people who are used to C-like programming languages and will find rc's syntax very enjoyable. For example: · for (i in `{seq 1 100}) { · echo $i · } | Sane array handling: In rc `$array` expands to the whole array and if one of the elements of the array has spaces in it, it's still considered one single element after the array variable expansion. | Lacks return statement: rc has no `return` statement.
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Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com › item
Z – Jump around | Hacker News
January 20, 2024 - Eventually I came up with an alternative using fd¹ and fzf². I have a variant of this in my .zshrc: · function n { cd "$(fd . "${HOME}" --type d --color never | fzf --select-1 --query "${*}")" ls } Call it with `n` and get an interactive fuzzy search for your directories.
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Keploy
keploy.io › home › community › top alternatives to the zsh ls command
Top Alternatives to the Zsh ls Command | Keploy Blog
October 10, 2025 - Explore top Zsh ls alternatives to enhance your terminal. Discover powerful, user-friendly replacements for the classic ls command.
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DEV Community
dev.to › drazik › comment › 17mlg
z looks great but I understand that it only word with ZSH. Are there alternat... - DEV Community
z looks great but I understand that it only word with ZSH. Are there alternatives for other shells? Ben Sinclair · Ben Sinclair · Ben Sinclair · Follow · I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer. I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
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Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Z_shell
Z shell - Wikipedia
3 weeks ago - The same organization also developed Antigen, one of the earliest popular plugin managers for Zsh. Furthermore, the community actively expands the Z shell ecosystem with alternative configuration managers, such as the high-performance framework Zim (zimfw), which focuses on execution speed, ...
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R Systems
rsystems.com › blogs › making-your-terminal-more-productive-with-z-shell-zsh
Making Your Terminal More Productive With Z-Shell (ZSH) - R Systems
February 5, 2026 - git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-completions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:=~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-completions · It’s a faster way of navigating the file system; it works by maintaining a database of directories you visit the most. More details can be found here. ... You can also use the plugin Z as an alternative if you’re not able to install autojump or for any other reason.
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Smashing Magazine
smashingmagazine.com › 2015 › 07 › become-command-line-power-user-oh-my-zsh-z
Become A Command-Line Power User With Oh My ZSH And Z — Smashing Magazine
July 11, 2015 - It cannot, however, do any of the ZSH and Z that we will be exploring below. For a full-blown UNIX emulation, there is Cygwin which allows us to run all UNIX commands as well as to work with Oh My ZSH. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you are fairly comfortable with Windows, it might be worth trying out. Alternatively there is the all-in-one OH MY CYGWIN, which might speed up your installation process.
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Oh My Zsh!
ohmyz.sh
Oh My Zsh - a delightful & open source framework for Zsh
Oh My Zsh is a popular open-source Zsh configuration framework loved by developers worldwide. It includes 300+ plugins, themes, and tweaks to supercharge your terminal experience.