Your Terminal and You

A Tutorial to Customizing Your Shell

We all have a love/hate relationship with our CLI, no matter what operating system. Don't even get me started on emacs.

I've started spending hours at work customizing the colour scheme and font/icon option, and I have finally found the one:

Switching my terminal of choice from the native Terminal on macOS to iTerm and using Oh My Zsh to manage my zsh configurations allowed me a greater depth to play with. It only involves a few curls and clones - the total process takes only a few minutes to make the tool you revolve your life around just right.

Steps

1. Install iTerm2 from this link or use brew cask install iterm2.

2. Open iTerm2 and install Oh My Zsh by curling:

   sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

3. Open your ~/.zshrc file (I like using vim with vim ~/.zshrc) and add the line:

   ZSH_THEME="agnoster"

4. Install this font.
5. Open iTerm (your icons will look funky) and cmd-i to open your Preferences. Under Text select your font to be Meslo LG M Reguar for Powerline.

6. Clone this repo using

   git clone https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes

   to save all the schemas somewhere.

7. Pick your favourite theme from the repo and cmd-i to open Preferences and under Colors click Color Presets import the scheme you like from iTerm2-Color-Schemes/schemes (you can also tweak the colors at this tab).
8. Save your present under General.

Hopefully this points you in the right direction to customize your CLI to your liking. Reading through the commented out lines in ~/.zshrc will help you understand what is in your control.