Incognito Mode for Zsh

Incognito Mode. We all use it from time to time, but, if you’re a heavy terminal user, you might use your terminal as often and in as many diverse ways as your browsers.

…so I thought, why not make an incognito mode for Zsh?

With this script, typing anonsh will recognfigure an open zsh instance in several ways:

• HISTFILE will be unset so you still have a command history, but new entries won’t get copied from RAM to disk and will get erased when you exit the shell.
• If you’re using the zsh_hardstatus_precmd function from my custom prompt, it will be redefined to show anonsh instead of the command name or working directory.
• If the %1~ token for displaying the current path is found in your PS1/PS2/PS3/PS4 prompt variables (or the $base_prompt from my custom .zshrc), then it will be replaced with a literal ... so that clear can’t leave anything problematic behind.
• clear will be redefined so that it also uses every method I could find to ask your terminal to clear its scrollback buffer, as well as asking GNU screen to empty its own scrollback buffer if $TERM is set to screen.
• Zsh will be configured to call clear before exiting to clear any scrollback that might otherwise hang around if you are using termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@ in your .screenrc.

Enjoy. 🙂

Incognito Mode for Zsh by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.