Oh My Zsh

3 min readJan 11, 2017

Introduction

Every Developer needs to learn the Original Command-Line Input rather than what is known as Graphical User Interface.

But, nobody wants to use CMD (Windows) / Bash or Shell (Linux) / Terminal (Mac) because quite frankly it sucks. What if the Terminal has a pretty sleaky UI.

That’s where OH MY ZSH comes into the picture.

What is Oh-My-Zsh ?

Oh-My-Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout…

Your terminal never felt this good before.

Installing Zsh

In order to install Zsh, follow these steps:

1. There are two main ways to install Zsh
— with the package manager of your choice (_e.g._ sudo apt-get install zsh) or
— from source, following instructions from the Zsh FAQ
2. Verify installation by running zsh — version. Expected result: zsh 4.3.9 or more recent.
3. Make it your default shell: chsh -s $(which zsh)
— Note that this will not work if Zsh is not in your authorized shells list (`/etc/shells`)
or if you don’t have permission to use `chsh`. If that’s the case you’ll need to use a different procedure.
4. Log out and login back again to use your new default shell.
5. Test that it worked with echo $SHELL. Expected result: /bin/zsh

Installing Oh-My-Zsh

OPTION 1:

(1) Install `curl` first if you don’t have it already

$ sudo apt-get install curl

(2) Install `oh-my-zsh` via `curl`

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

OPTION 2:

(1) Install `wget` first if you don’t have it already

$ sudo apt-get install wget

(2) Install `oh-my-zsh` via `wget`

$ sh -c “$(wget https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh -O -)”

Installing New Theme

Default Theme is `robbyrussell`, the creator of `Oh-My-Zsh`.

Download the Theme which you want to use & put it in `~/.oh-my-zsh/themes/`. Note that many themes are already available.

To remove the original theme, open `~/.zshrc` in your favourite text editor & remove or comment (#) the following line

ZSH_THEME=”robbyrussell”

Then add the following line with the theme of your choice which can be found here.

ZSH_THEME=”cute-theme”

This is the theme I’m currently using.

Install Some Plugins

Oh My Zsh comes with a shit load of plugins to take advantage of. You can take a look in the plugins directory and/or the wiki to see what’s currently available.

Download the Plugins which you want to use & put it in `~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/`. Note that many plugins are already available.

Open `~/.zshrc` in your favourite text editor & add some plugins you want to use.