ZSH suffix aliases

by Etienne Millon on January 17, 2012

Tagged as: linux, zsh.

I recently changed my login shell to use zsh instead of the venerable bash. I am still wondering why I didn’t make the change earlier. Zsh’s infamous slowness almost not perceptible, at least with the default configuration.

One cool feature present in zsh is the notion of suffix alias (described in zshbuiltins(1)). Quick example :

$ alias -s pdf=evince
$ filename.pdf

… will open filename.pdf under evince, as if evince filename.pdf had been typed. Handy !

But it is not restricted to files : the command is executed whenever the command line matches a suffix alias. So, for example you can define :

alias -s git='git clone'

… so that everytime you paste a URL ending in git, say git://git.debian.org/git/aptitude/aptitude.git, it will be git-cloned.