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I have finally decided to give zsh a thorough review. I’ve been hearing about it for a couple years in and around tech user group meetings, technical conferences and from people I follow on Twitter. I guess the proverbial “straw that…” got me to take a hard look was when I moved from Cygwin to Babun (which you should do right now). This was how I expressed my opinion of Babun on Twitter. I obviously am liking it. 😉

Christmas came early. I stumbled across Babun, a great replacement for Cygwin! New favorite windows shell! http://t.co/G4vLHDAZoR

— Erik Weibust (@erikweibust) May 17, 2014

Anyhow, this is a post about Zsh, and I have some questions I’m hoping the Zsh users out there can help clear up.

1. I’m assuming everyone is using Oh-My-Zsh?
2. While using Oh-My-Zsh, because I’m also using it while test-driving zsh, where do I make edits to shell defaults? I would assume I can just make edits to .zshrc? I’d like to add stuff like (set -o vi, alias vi=vim, etc.). Nothing to advanced, just some minor edits I need before I can even get comfortable with the shell.
3. Since I just mentioned an alias, where is the idiomatic place to add my personal aliases? I saw a handful added in the .zshrc as examples, I normally source a personal alias file from my .bashrc, is that common with zsh?
4. Most of my questions come from when I change/customize something in .oh-my-zsh/ over the zsh config files? I’m struggling with when I add to a oh-my-zsh theme over creating my own, or just making the changes in .zshrc

Thanks in advance for any help…