Terminal Boosters

Published in

Productivity Freak

3 min readMar 9, 2019

A collection of Terminal tools I love, for better productivity.

Homebrew + Cask

Homebrew-Cask extends Homebrew and brings its elegance, simplicity, and speed to macOS applications and large binaries alike.

Not only brew is a lovely (and the leading) package manager for macOS, it also comes with cask, command to install applications.

This allows to install apps like Google Chrome, Spotify, VSCode, Slack etc with a single command:

brew cask install google-chrome spotify slack visual-studio-code

List of all available applications: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/tree/master/Casks

Saves a lot of time when setting up a new machine.

iTerm 2

iTerm 2 is a replacement for Terminal. Comes with gazillion features.

brew cask install iterm2

oh-my-zsh

While macOS comes with bash shell built in, zsh is a far better alternative.

oh-my-zsh is a framework for zsh configurations. It includes many plugins with various autocompletes (git, npm/yarn, python, rails etc).

One big feature Oh-My-Zsh adds is an enhanced <tab> behavior to various of things. E.g. type npm run <tab> will show all available npm scripts commands from package.json, and all navigable with arrows. Same for cd and gitcommands. Plugins need to be activated in ~/.zshrc file.

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

Bat

A cat(1) clone with wings.

A beautiful cat replacement that has syntax highlight.

brew install bat

fkill-cli

Fabulously kill processes. Cross-platform.

npm install --global fkill-cli

Tired of ps -ef | grep <process> and then kill <PID>? fkill kills processes by name, e.g. fkill node.

Comes with Alfred workflow too:

npm install --global alfred-fkill

fzf

In shell (bash/zsh), ctrl+r searches recent commands but shows only a single result. FZF is more like most editors’ cmd+t, where it shows multiple fuzzy matches for a search string, navigable by arrows. Love it!

brew install fzf

zsh-autosuggestions

Fish-like autosuggestions for zsh

Autocompletes terminal commands from history. Shows the autocompletion in gray, and right arrow brings up the entire command.

zsh-syntax-highlighting

Command syntax highlighting for Zsh.

autojump

A cd command that learns — easily navigate directories from the command line

Every time you type cd <path>, autojump remembers the path, and allows executing j <string>, string being a fuzzy search of recently entered paths.

E.g. if you type a lot cd ~/code/foobar , j foo can access the same folder.

Alternative: z

fd

A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to ‘find’

fd simplifies find command by allowing fd PATTERN instead of find -iname '*PATTERN*'.

iTerm2 Dracula Theme

My favorite theme, also on iTerm

git clone https://github.com/dracula/iterm.git

iTerm2 > Preferences > Profiles > Colors Tab
Open the Color Presets… drop-down in the bottom right corner
Select Import… from the list
Select the Dracula.itermcolors file
Select the Dracula from Color Presets…

Lastly

Add these lines to ~/.zshrc

export EDITOR="code" # your favorite editor goes here
alias zc="$EDITOR ~/.zshrc"

for faster editing of the RC file, just type zc. I do it so frequently that I need this.

Got more? Let me know in the comments!

Like this?

Hit the clap button 👏👏🏻👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾👏🏿 (as many times as you want!).

Follow me on Twitter — @elado, and check out my other productivity tools posts: