ericsysmin's DevOps Blog

Having moved away from development of Ansible/Python/Terraform, and others on Windows a few years ago. I’ve heard that WSL has become much better, especially with its support of VS Code now that they have a WSL connector. So, I decided to give it a try.

However, I did run into one surprising inconvenience, BASH! I have become so accustomed to ZSH over the years on Apple and using oh-my-zsh that all my shortcuts and quick ways to doing things just weren’t there.

I did attempt to use oh-my-bash but there just aren’t the number of plugins already to support the plethora of plugins I need and use on a regular basis. So, next logical step is to install ZSH on my WSL: Ubuntu system.

Requirements

WSL with Ubuntu installed

Steps to install ZSH

1. Install ZSH.
   
   1	sudo apt install zsh

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

   eanderson@MATRIX-WINDOWS:~$ sudo apt install zsh [sudo] password for eanderson: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed:   zsh-common Suggested packages:   zsh-doc The following NEW packages will be installed:   zsh zsh-common 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 4794 kB of archives. After this operation, 18.2 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

2. Verify that ZSH has been installed on the system.
   
   1	zsh --version

   1 2	eanderson@MATRIX-WINDOWS:~$ zsh --version zsh 5.8.1 (x86_64-ubuntu-linux-gnu)

3. Set ZSH as your default shell.
   NOTE: This used to require modifications to the shortcut to access WSL but in newer versions of WSL you can use the following.
   
   1	chsh -s /bin/zsh

   For older versions you will need to modify the shortcut to WSL and use the command:

   1	%systemroot%\system32\bash.exe ~ -c /bin/zsh

4. Once you close and reopen your WSL Ubuntu shell you should now be in ZSH shell.
   
   
   

Install of Oh-my-zsh

1. Ensure that your terminal session is open and use the following command as per https://ohmyz.sh/#install
   
   1	sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

2. You should now be able to configure your oh-my-zsh installation by modifying your .zshrc file and enable any plugins you need.
3. The final result! 🙂 
   

   

Hopefully that helps, I know it helped me as I venture back to Windows for development of my Ansible playbooks and other tools.