Style your Terminal better by mastering these settings 🤩

This is a complete guide to style your iTerm2 using only it’s default settings.

5 min readAug 23, 2018

My terminal use to look very basic but then I played around with these settings and see the changes:

We all love Oh-my-zsh, It’s awesome. But iTerm in itself is quite a powerful tool so Let see it’s setting that you can play around one by one.

👉🏼 Appearance Settings

This is the most powerful setting as this can completely transform your terminal’s look and feel. There are a lot of options you can go through but let’s discuss the major setting options only.

1. Tabs

Tab bar location: You can position your tab bar in three locations top, bottom or left. Try “left”, it will give you a feel of text editor.

Theme: There are two themes, one is dark and one is light. Pro Tip: Use dark with a dark color preset and light with light. Check out how cool left tab looks in the dark theme. Just shrink the tab section and it will look like below.

Other small settings: Tabs show a lot of information, that may not be required. Check out my settings below or just play around with your own to hide extra content.

2. Panes

You can hide and show tabs in the split panes. I personally like it without tab.

3. Dimming

You must have noticed when you have multiple panes and you working on one others pane become Dim. You can change that using this setting. I have disabled the dimming as it looks cleaner when active.

👉🏼 Profile Settings

You can play around with a lot of style elements in this section. This is also where you can create your own custom design profile, as making changes in default is not recommended.

📝 Note: Do check out the link to my profilr setting file at the end of the article that you easily import.

👉🏼 Colors Setting

This is most important as color defines everything. Let’s go through the most important settings.

1. Color Presets:

We all love Oh-My-Zsh templates but do you know that iTerm has it’s own Color preset, that you can be imported easily. Check out iterm2colorschemes.com for this.

My personal favorites are:

2. Cursor Guide:

This is a small little tweak, but this can make your terminal look kick a**. It gives a background color to the line where the cursor is and it looks super cool. You can also changes its color to suit your color preset.

👉🏼 Text Setting

90% you see on the terminal is text so let’s customize that in this section.

1. Cursor Type:

There are three cursor types that you can select from Underline, Vertical bar and Box. I Like box.

2. Font Type:

In my example, I’m using Operator Mono but it’s an expensive font. You can use Other popular Fonts like Hack or M+2m or PowerLevel Fonts. Check out this great list of top 11 fonts.

👉🏼 Window Settings

Here you can play with Background window. Two major settings are:

1. Transparency:

Where simply you can make the window transparent. I like it opaque but you can always give it a try.

2. Background Image:

In case you want to add any cool picture in the background on maybe your logo, this can help. I recommend using a pattern, you can download it from here, check out this cool Star Wars like Pattern

📝 Note: While using pattern do choose “tile image” option.

This is all for now guys. Hope you enjoyed this article. Do share your own customised terminal’s pictures in the comment section. If you found this helpful, don’t forget to leave some claps 👏🏼 . Share this with your friends and followers!

🎉 If you want to just copy paste all the setting and save time, here is a gist.🎉

One more thing 😜. I’m planning to work on some cool Javascript Projects and if you are too, then let’s collaborate guys, tweet me @Sarthology.