Making Terminal Great Again

A question I often get asked is “What did you do to your terminal?”.

Here’s what it looks like, in case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about:

A few things to notice:

• Fancy Colors
• Fancy Fonts
• Fancy Prompt
• The state of my git repository

How did I do it?

Simply put, the answer is oh-my-zsh

Installing oh-my-zsh is extremely easy, and gives you a better terminal that you could ever have before.

To install it, simply open up your terminal and type in:

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

(Taken directly from Oh-My-Zsh’s official website)

After installing it, you’ll notice that your prompt looks a bit different from mine:

Essentially, the only difference is the theme, which by default is robbyrussell. While it’s an alright theme, and does the job, it’s not fancy enough for me.

To fix this, we’ll change our theme to agnoster.

To do this, we’ll have to edit our .zshrc

nano ~/.zshrc # or use vim, doesn't really matter # find the line that says theme="robbyrussell" # make it say theme="agnoster" source ~/.zshrc # reloads the terminal

Immediately, we notice a problem:

The problem is that we need a font that supports powerline’s characters. Thankfully, fixing this is really easy, we just need to download a font that fixes this. Personally, I use Menlo for Powerline, but any font with powerline support works.

Download Menlo for Powerline here

After this, we just need to change the font.

For Linux, simply go to Edit -> Profile Preferences, then choose Menlo for powerline as your font.

For Mac, open preferences for your terminal (⌘+comma) and change your profile’s font.

And boom, you’re done. 😎

Oh-My-Zsh actually has a ton more interesting themes, which you can check out here

In addition, it has many more plugins (besides git), such as django, python, and many more (can be found here)

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Originally published at blog.ronakshah.net.