Scott Whittaker

Oh My Zsh Custom Aliases

I recently installed Oh My Zsh on a new machine which is not something you do often. I actually read the ~/.zshrc file this time before I added an alias and found the following which recommends you add your custom aliases in the ZSH_CUSTOM folder.

# Set personal aliases, overriding those provided by oh-my-zsh libs,
# plugins, and themes. Aliases can be placed here, though oh-my-zsh
# users are encouraged to define aliases within the ZSH_CUSTOM folder.
# For a full list of active aliases, run `alias`.

Note that you can find the location of your custom folder using echo $ZSH_CUSTOM. On a mac that would like this…

echo $ZSH_CUSTOM
/Users/<username>/.oh-my-zsh/custom

You can call the file anything you like as long as the file extension is .zsh and the file is immediatley under the .oh-my-zsh/custom directory, for example .oh-my-zsh/custom/my-aliases.zsh. I found the answer to this in this thread.

You can create as many files as you like here providing a nice approach to organising your aliases on a per-project basis for example.

project-1.zsh
project-2.zsh
project-3.zsh

Also note that in the custom directory there is a handy examples.zsh file which reads as follows…

# You can put files here to add functionality separated per file, which
# will be ignored by git.
# Files on the custom/ directory will be automatically loaded by the init
# script, in alphabetical order.

# For example: add yourself some shortcuts to projects you often work on.
#
# brainstormr=~/Projects/development/planetargon/brainstormr
# cd $brainstormr
#

I am going to be far more organised as far as aliases are concerned from now on.