In this video, I'm going to show you how to take your boring default terminal on Mac OS with no syntax highlighting, no colors, and a crappy font, and turn it into this: an amazing terminal with a helpful configurable status bar that displays a lot of helpful information, syntax highlighting when typing out commands, and an amazing looking LS command. Also, an amazing font and more. Stick around and make sure to like and subscribe, and I'll show you how it's done. Now, I have been a developer for over 10 years, and I can say that for most of that time, I didn't really care too much about how my terminal looked. As long as it did its job and stayed out of my way, I was happy. But after discovering just a few tools and programs, I can confidently say this is the best terminal experience I have ever had. So now let me show you how to go from zero to hero in just a few quick minutes. The first thing you're going to want to do is throw out that drabble terminal and get something more

modern and sexy. Trust me, you'll thank me later. Go ahead and download iTerm 2, and as soon as you click that download button, just listen to everyone around you gasp. They know something's up, or more likely than not, you're home alone and nobody is anywhere near you. Either way, I'm excited for you. Now, after you've installed iTerm 2, you're going to want to make sure your default terminal shell is zsh. You can double-check this by typing echo $0, which will spit out your current terminal shell. If it is not zsh and you don't have it installed, you can do so using Homebrew. Then, you will want to use the change shell command to make sure you're using CSH after it's installed. Before we go any further, we're going to want to install a color scheme for our terminal. Now, I forgot to shoot this part until after I edited the video, so the whole entire video I'm using this color scheme anyways, but I'm going to show you how to install it here.

basically, we go to iTerm to color schemes.com. And I like Groov Box Dark, so I search for that. I find it. And then what you're going to want to do is copy the content of this file and create a new file called groovebox.itermcolors. Next, you want to open your settings for iTerm. Go to colors and click on import. Then you want to import the new file you just created. And voila, you have Groov Box Dark on your iTerm. Now back to the video in regular time. The next thing we're going to want to do is install Oh My Zsh. Oh My Zsh is an open-source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. It comes with a ton of amazing themes and amazing plugins that you can install ad hoc. And after looking at their documentation, I did not realize how hilarious it is. Give it a read sometime. To install Oh My Zsh, you're going to want to run one of a few commands. I'm going to use the one with

Carl because I have Carl installed if not install curl or wget or fetch. Essentially what this does is it will install omicsh through the install.sh script, which you can always check out if you want on their GitHub page, just to make sure it's not removing every single file on your machine. Now to install on my zsh, simply copy and paste that curl command clones into all my zsh, and you're done. Wow, that's pretty quick. Anyways, now you have all my zsh installed. You can check out the zshrc file that it creates for you, and you can see that we have a zsh theme variable that if you change it, it will change your theme, and you have a plugins variable where you can set what plugins you want to run in on my zsh. Now, before we go any further, we're going to have to install a special kind of font, a font that has a lot of icons in it because a lot of the tools we're going to use involve icons. In order to get these cool

fonts, we're gonna have to go to nerdfonts.com. Nerd Fonts patches developer-targeted fonts with a high number of icons, so essentially, it adds icons to fonts that you already know and love. My personal favorite is Hack. Essentially, you want to go to the download page, download the font you want, and then open up that file and click install font. It's pretty simple on Mac OS. Once that is installed, you want to make sure you go to your preferences for item 2 and use the font that you just installed. Now you're going to have the icons that you need moving forward. The next program we're going to want to install is Powerlevel10K. Powerlevel10K is a theme for zsh that essentially gives you a nice status line for your terminal. It's extremely customizable, so read through the docs and see what you like. To install Powerlevel10K, we just want to clone the repo and then change the theme variable in our zshrc to be Powerlevel10K/powerlevel10K if

we quit out of the file, and then Source zshrc. We are present with a configuration wizard. This is all pretty straightforward, so just choose the options you like the best, and you'll see what you come out with. And you can see that I come out with a really cool-looking status line pretty easily. Awesome. Next, we're going to give our Terminal a little kick with a couple of plugins for oh my zsh. The first one we're going to install is zsh syntax highlighting, and it gives you essentially what it says: syntax highlighting for your zsh commands. To install it, you're going to call this git clone line from the install markdown file. And essentially what this does is it clones the repository to a special directory that oh my zsh knows to look out for. So later you can just add it to the plugins variable in your zshrc file. Next, we want to install zsh auto suggestions. This is a really cool plugin that gives you suggestions based on your previous things you're typing in your command line. The installation process is

essentially the same copy and paste the one liner. And then we go into our zsh RC file and add to the plugins variable. Our two new plugins zsh syntax highlighting and zsh auto suggestions. Next we want to quit vim and Source our zshrc file. And there you have it we have syntax highlighting and auto suggestions. Really awesome stuff. Now for a little bit of extra credit we want to give ourselves a cool looking LS command. And that comes with a really cool ruby gem called color LS. Now Mac OS has Ruby installed by default. So you could just write sudo gem install color LS. And it'll install it for you. Now if you type color LS you will see a really cool LS command. It has icons. It's syntax highlighted. It's really really neat. But I don't want to type color LS every time I want to list the files in a directory. So let's create a new alias in our zshrc file. So we open it up scroll down to the bottom. And add a new Alias setting LS equals color LS.

so now every time we type LS, it'll actually run color LS. And that is it. That is how you level up your Mac OS terminal. We now have syntax highlighting, Auto suggestions, oh my zsh, a cool status bar, and when we list our files, we get icons and syntax highlighting. Overall, this is really awesome, and I feel like I'm excited to open up my terminal from now on. Now, of course, with every good terminal configuration deserves a good Vim configuration. So if you're interested in learning about the neovim configuration you saw here, check out this video next. And as always, have a great day.

How to setup your Mac Terminal to be beautiful

Weekly content that will help developers level up 🚀. Topics are tailored for the modern programmer. Join your community for fresh, weekly content that keeps you in the know.

For collaboration or sponsorship opportunities, connect with us at sponsor@typecraft.dev.



How to setup your Mac Terminal to be beautiful

How to setup your Mac Terminal to be beautiful

스크립트