a view from afar

I'm working my way through From Bash to the Z Shell. I thought it was time I became a command-line guru because I'm sure I'm missing valuable tricks.

What I've found out so far about zsh:

• it comes with loads of completions built in (even one for darcs!)
• it's got a clever typo corrector

I'm only at chapter 2 but I've skipped ahead a bit. So far all I've been able to do is make the prompt display a fixed number of path segments (much cleaner than fixed-width truncation):

    27> ~ % cd Documents 
    28> ~/Documents % cd Development 
    29> ~/Documents/Development % cd bdd
    30> ~/Documents/Development/bdd % cd rspec-trunk 
    31> ../Documents/Development/bdd/rspec-trunk % cd rspec
    32> ../Development/bdd/rspec-trunk/rspec % 

UPDATE: threw away my 12 line precmd function and used the ternary operator described by David Porter in the comments below. Ironically, in From Bash to the Z Shell, the section on the ternary operator comes right before (p153) the section on path truncation (p155) and yet the path segments test is mentioned in neither.

Here is my current ~/.zshrc:

    export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH

    export EDITOR="mate -w"
    export SVN_EDITOR="mate -w"
    alias nano="nano -w"

    # correct typos in command names
    setopt correct

    # load completions
    autoload -U compinit
    compinit

    # needed to get variable substitutions in prompts
    setopt prompt_subst

    # [line number] [truncated path] %
    PS1='%!> %(5~|../|)%4~ %# '