Pimp your terminal

May 10, 2018

Many developers spend quite some time working with a command-line interface. Unfortunately those tools tends to look dull. So let's change that, shall we?

This guide will focus on Mac OS, but don't worry you can achieve a similar result on Linux or Windows. So before we start - let's take a look what we try to accomplish

First of all we are going to use Zsh and Oh My Zsh instead of the classical Bash Shell. Zsh is superior to many other shells but I don't want to go into detail here. To install it on Mac OS we will use Homebrew.

# Install Zsh
brew install zsh
# Install 'Oh My Zsh'
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

To get the best out of your new shell we are also going to install a Zsh extension called Spaceship.

git clone https://github.com/denysdovhan/spaceship-prompt.git "$ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/spaceship-prompt"
ln -s "$ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/spaceship-prompt/spaceship.zsh-theme" "$ZSH_CUSTOM/themes/spaceship.zsh-theme"

Don't forget to activate your new theme by setting ZSH_THEME="spaceship" in your ~/.zshrc.

Note: This extension requires a font which is optimized for Powerline. I recommend using 'Menlo for Powerline'.

brew tap caskroom/fonts
brew cask install font-menlo-for-powerline

Next up we need an extendable command-line interface. Hyper is a beautiful terminal build on open web standard and available for all major operating systems. You can find a copy of the latest release here or use Homebrew Cask to install the app by running these commands:

brew update
brew cask install hyper

Finally we are going configure Hyper to use Zsh and install a neat little theme. Open your Hyper settings and adapt the following entries:

fontFamily: '"Menlo for Powerline", monospace',
shell: '/bin/zsh',
plugins: [
  'hyper-one-dark'
],

That's it. Happy Hacking. ✌️