zsh syntax highlighting

I like colours.  I have aliased all frequently used commands like ls, grep, etc. by adding flags to show colours in the output.  I have set my PS1 in such a way that the prompt is in a different colour.  It makes it easy for me to see where the prompt ends and the command starts.  When I heard about fish and that it does syntax highlighting, I was tempted to switch to it.  But I couldn’t because it didn’t do certain things I needed.  (I don’t remember the details now.)  Soon after that I found out that it’s very simple to add syntax highlighting to zsh!

All you have to do is download the code from zsh-syntax-highlighting project and “source” it in your .zshrc.  But I wasn’t happy with their defaults.  By default this script underlines path names, but I hate underlining because it makes text less readable.  I also didn’t like their choice of blue colour for globs.  On my black terminal, blue is hardly readable.  Customising the formatting was easy too; I only had to change the value of a variable.  This is what my .zshrc has now, and syntax highlighting works like a charm.

source ~/dload/src/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[globbing]='fg=yellow'
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[path]='bold'

You can find the list of different syntax highlighting options in this file.