How to get a fancy looking terminal

Let's go from this

To this

Prerequisites

• Have Homebrew installed. This can be done with the following command (to copy-paste in the terminal)

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

• ITerm2

brew install --cask iterm2

From this point, all commands should be run in iTerm2 (no specific reason besides building muscle memory)

ZSH, Oh My Zsh and Oh my Posh

Since 2019, macOS is shipping with ZSH as a default shell, so we will be building on this. To help us tweak things easily, we will use Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. Sounds boring. Let's try again. Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer...but you may feel like one! Source - https://ohmyz.sh/

To install it, simply run the following in the terminal

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Things already look sexier, but we are just getting started, as mentioned by the terminal, let's go into the .zshrc file to see what we have. You can open it any way you want, I am using Sublime Text 3 and therefore I can do subl .zshrc to edit it in Sublime Text directly

We basically have 4 main elements (oh my zsh config, the theme, plugins to load, and our actual configuration)

# Path to your oh-my-zsh installation.
export ZSH="/Users/pstember/.oh-my-zsh"

# There to load
ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

# Which plugins would you like to load?
# Standard plugins can be found in $ZSH/plugins/
# Custom plugins may be added to $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(git)

source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

Before doing any kind of customization, let's add a theme that will get us 80% there 🎉

Our theme of choice will be Oh-My-Posh - https://ohmyposh.dev/

Our theme will only affect the red selection in the following screenshot

To install it, run the following command

brew install jandedobbeleer/oh-my-posh/oh-my-posh

And replace the line with ZSH_THEME=robbyrussell with the following from your .zshrc file

eval "$(oh-my-posh init zsh --config ~/.config/ohmyposh/theme.toml)"

DO NOT FORGET to create the folder and copy the theme over, if you rather use the default one, remove --config and its value. Then reload the config with

reset

Now the theme should kick in and you are good to go 🎉🎉🎉

Plugins

To enhance our experience, we will need some plugins, my suggestion is to go with to have the right level of auto-complete when pressing tab

To get this, go back to .zshrc

# Which plugins would you like to load?
# Standard plugins can be found in $ZSH/plugins/
# Custom plugins may be added to $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(
  git
  kubectl
  docker
  docker-compose
  httpie
)

On top of the build-in, we will also use the following ones

• zsh-syntax-highlighting - This turns your entry from red to green when the command exists
• zsh-autosuggestions - This will suggest a command based on your input and history

To install, run the following

brew install zsh-syntax-highlighting
brew install zsh-autosuggestions

Then add the two next lines in your .zshrc right below the plugins section

source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh # ALREADY EXIST IN THE FILE, add below
source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh
source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

Custom commands and aliases

To overwrite some of the default command, we need to install the following

brew install exa

brew tap cantino/mcfly
brew install mcfly

brew install bat
brew install prettyping

and add the following in your .zshrc file

if [ -x "$(command -v exa)" ]; then
    alias ls="exa --icons"
    alias la="exa --long --all --group --icons"
    alias lt="exa --tree --level=2 --icons"
fi

eval "$(mcfly init zsh)"

alias cat='bat'
alias ping='prettyping --nolegend'

And don't forget to create your own aliases like these ones

alias cp='cp -iv'                           # Preferred 'cp' implementation
alias mv='mv -iv'                           # Preferred 'mv' implementation
alias mkdir='mkdir -pv'                     # Preferred 'mkdir' implementation
alias less='less -FSRXc'                    # Preferred 'less' implementation
# cd() { builtin cd "$@"; ll; }               # Always list directory contents upon 'cd'
alias cd..='cd ../'                         # Go back 1 directory level (for fast typers)
# alias ..='cd ../'                           # Go back 1 directory level
# alias ...='cd ../../'                       # Go back 2 directory levels
alias .3='cd ../../../'                     # Go back 3 directory levels
alias .4='cd ../../../../'                  # Go back 4 directory levels
alias .5='cd ../../../../../'               # Go back 5 directory levels
alias .6='cd ../../../../../../'            # Go back 6 directory levels
alias edit='subl'                           # edit:         Opens any file in sublime editor
alias f='open -a Finder ./'                 # f:            Opens current directory in MacOS Finder
alias c='clear'                             # c:            Clear terminal display
alias path='echo -e ${PATH//:/\\n}'         # path:         Echo all executable Paths
alias cic='set completion-ignore-case On'   # cic:          Make tab-completion case-insensitive
mcd () { mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"; }        # mcd:          Makes new Dir and jumps inside
trash () { command mv "$@" ~/.Trash ; }     # trash:        Moves a file to the MacOS trash

#   extract:  Extract most know archives with one command
#   ---------------------------------------------------------
    extract () {
        if [ -f $1 ] ; then
          case $1 in
            *.tar.bz2)   tar xjf $1     ;;
            *.tar.gz)    tar xzf $1     ;;
            *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1     ;;
            *.rar)       unrar e $1     ;;
            *.gz)        gunzip $1      ;;
            *.tar)       tar xf $1      ;;
            *.tbz2)      tar xjf $1     ;;
            *.tgz)       tar xzf $1     ;;
            *.zip)       unzip $1       ;;
            *.Z)         uncompress $1  ;;
            *.7z)        7z x $1        ;;
            *)     echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via extract()" ;;
             esac
         else
             echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
         fi
    }

From here, you should be good to go

Don't forget to update the file as your install more things into your environment like

• java
• go
• ruby
• etc.

My actual config file is available here - https://github.com/pstember/boot/blob/master/.zshrc