Hello and a Happy New Year! I am just testing zsh as a replacement of bash. Our zsh does not really work out-of-the-box. It does not use /etc/profile and as a result of this you cannot type or read umlauts etc.. I have opened a bug about this: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8946 But there does not seems to be a straight-forward-solution; so we should discuss about this first. I have noticed that Aaron introduced a generic /etc/profile which will load all scripts in /etc/profile.d/ and source any specific file like /etc/profile.zsh, /etc/profile.bash etc.. At first: the filesystem package should be bumped to get the new /etc/profile due to a pacman bug (?). Then we need to add a profile.zsh to the zsh package. I have attached a working one based on the one found within the bash package. The configure-line o zsh should be changed to the following: ./configure --prefix=/usr --bindir=/bin \ --enable-zprofile=/etc/profile \ --with-curses-terminfo \ --enable-multibyte || return 1 After this changes zsh is quite usable (even with utf8 etc.). But: This only works when logging in into a VT. If you start xterm, Konsole etc. you will end up in a zsh without any locale support and no environment variables set. Thomas told me that xterm does not use a login shell and because of this /etc/profile is not executed. (but why does this work with bash). Does anybody know a clean solution for this? Pierre PS: zsh seems to be really cool. The menu-based completition is quite nice. See my .zshrc (based on the one from grml): http://users.archlinux.de/~pierre/arch/zshrc -- http://www.archlinux.de