Switching to zsh

I have never looked into using a different shell in Linux, I’m not entirely sure why, maybe I just liked bash enough. This past week I started looking into zsh, and liked what I saw. Last night I migrated my shell files to be 99.9% interchangeable between shells and continue to load what I want without me having to change anything.

This post outlines some changes I made that will allow me to use both bash and zsh with the same startup files, but still have some shell specific settings that will get sourced. I didn’t need to move the files to ~/.shellfiles, but I felt having all of them as symlinks instead of some being symlinks to other dotfiles. Some of the shell specific things are setopt/shopt commands, setting prompts, and history settings.

I am storing the files in ~/.shellfiles, it isn’t my preferred choice, but it is less likely to be used by something else. Since I use version control on my home directory I needed to first ‘hg rename’ each one of my files to the ~/.shellfiles directory. After moving the files symlinks needed to be created to the original files.
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