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PATH Ethic

path-ethic is a native Zsh plugin that provides CLI for PATH manipulation, preset management and automatic loading. It does not touch your existing .zshrc, .zprofile or any other shell environment configuration, but adds on top of your existing environment.

Main Features

Limitations

Alternatives

If you are looking for a more comprehensive and advanced shell environment configuration management tool, or something that supports more shells, check out direnv.

Features

Path Editing Commands

show

peth [show] - displays the current value of PATH and the values of any set prefix and suffix.

list

peth list - similar to show but lists elements in separate lines.

push

peth push <path> - adds a new element at the beginning of the PATH and re-exports.

append

peth append <path> - adds a new element at the end of the PATH and re-exports.

flip

peth flip - flips the prefix and suffix to reverse their priority. This is a very handy feature if often need to switch between different verisons of the same software.

Demo

rm

peth rm <path> - removes a path element from the PATH and re-exports.

reset

peth reset - removes all prefixes and suffixes and re-exports the original PATH.

Preset Management Commands

save

peth save [name] - saves the current session PATH settings as a preset for later recall. If the optional name argument is provided, settings are saved as a named preset, otherwise they are saved to the default preset. The default preset is special in the fact that it does not include changes made to the original PATH during the session. Instead it only saves the prefix and suffix. This makes it possible to always go back to your current .zshrc or .zprofile set PATH settings and edit from there.

load

peth load [name] - loads a previously saved preset into the current session. If the optional name argument is provided, attempts to load a named preset, otherwise loads the default preset.

listp

peth listp - lists all saved presets with a visual indication regarding which one is currently loaded.

rmp

peth rmp <name> - removes a previously saved named preset.

Other Commands

update

peth update - if cloned from a remote git repository, prompts to pull the latest changes from that remote.

help

peth help - displays help.

Automatic Preset Loading with .pethrc

When you change directory the plugin looks for a file named .pethrc in the target directory. If one is found, it tries to read a preset name from it and load it into the current session. This is helpful if you need different sets of tools or verisons for different projects. To take adventage of this feature, first save a named preset and then just create a .pethrc with its name in your project directory.

Zsh Completion

The plugin comes bundled with completion functions that are automatically registered to be loaded if Zsh completion system is enabled. If completion doesn’t work for the peth command, consider adding the following to .zshrc.

# enable autocomplete functions
autoload -U compinit
compinit

How to Install

  1. Clone this repository to a directory of your choice 
    cd /your-dir
git clone git@github.com:sha1n/path-ethics.git
  2. Enable the plugin by sourcing it’s main script in ~/.zshrc . 
    source /your-dir/path-ethic/path-ethic.plugin.zsh

    Install as Oh-My-Zsh plugin

  3. Clone this repository to $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/path-ethic 
    mkdir -p "$ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins" && git clone git@github.com:sha1n/path-ethics.git "$ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/path-ethic"
  4. Enable the plugin by adding path-ethic to the plugin list plugins=() in ~/.zshrc . 
    plugins=(
  path-ethic      # <-- add this
)

How to Uninstall

  1. Reverse the installation steps.
  2. You may want to delete the directory ~/.path-ethic. This is where committed PATH elements and presets are saved.

Migrating Persistent Data

In order to make committed changes more portable, right before changes are saved all user home paths are replaced with $HOME. Therefore, when you migrate settings to a new computer or user on the same computer, you can simply install the plugin, copy ~/.path-ethic to your new home directory and you should be good to go.