The developers of the Z shell have announced
the release of zsh 5.0.0, the first major stable version of the tool
since zsh 4.2 was released in 2004. Zsh is a shell for Unix and
Unix-like operating systems that is mainly designed for interactive use,
but is also suited to other tasks. The latest stable release of the
project was zsh 4.2.7 in 2008.
The 5.0 release includes the features that have been developed in the
unstable 4.3.x branch of the project; this includes support for
highlighting, colour display and job control in non-interactive use.
This new release also adds support for multibyte character strings.
Version 5.0 of zsh includes new options that improve POSIX
compliance, debugging and the history functions of the shell. New shell
variables give users information about the current sub-shell level and
the exact patch level of the tool, providing more granularity between
release versions. Users can define patterns to be ignored by spelling
correction. Z shell 5.0 also includes several new features that improve
text completion, command evaluation and expansion of parameters. A full
list of new features is available in the NEWS file for the release.
The source code for zsh is licensed under its own MIT-like licence and can be downloaded from the project's mirrors and FTP server.
