Anthony Lagrede

Posted on Jan 7, 2022

Terminal Setup - Make your Mac terminal awesome

#terminal #ohmyzsh #bash #dev

I recently installed my new MacBook and set up my terminal. Here I'll show you how to do the same for your MacBook.

The final result

This is the end result based on the delicious powerlevel10k. Easy to configure and modify. Optimized to work as a developer.

You will notice the toolbar at the top (Cpu, Ram, Network) to always have an overview of the hardware consumption.

Prerequisites

Install Homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Install iTerm2 and git

brew install --cask iterm2
brew install git

Install Oh My Zsh

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Theme installation

I choosed powerlevel10k probably one of the best and most flexible theme you can choose.
You can easily change your terminal layout simply by rerun the installation command.

Start to install MesloLGS Fonts

MesloLGS NF Regular.ttf
MesloLGS NF Bold.ttf
MesloLGS NF Italic.ttf
MesloLGS NF Bold Italic.ttf

Then install powerlevel10k itself

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k

In ~/.zshrc set the ZSH theme to use:

ZSH_THEME="powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k" in ~/.zshrc.

You will probably at least configure these two ZSH plugins:

zsh-syntax-highlighting - Fish shell like syntax highlighting for Zsh. This is what makes my aliases/commands green above. If it's green then it's installed!
zsh-autosuggestions - Fish-like autosuggestions for zsh. Will show a preview of the last matching command while typing. Press right to use

In ~/.zshrc set the ZSH plugins to use:

plugins=(
  git
  zsh-syntax-highlighting
  zsh-autosuggestions
)

Restart your terminal with Zsh

Now you can run

p10k configure

If you have issue with fonts, check MesloLGS font is selected.
Open iTerm2 → Preferences → Profiles → Text and set Font to MesloLGS NF.

Finally, if you want to include your existing bash aliases and functions:
In ~/.zshrc source your bash_profile just before the export ZSH

source ~/.bash_profile

Add the Toolbar

Open your iterm2 > Profile > Session > Status bar enabled

Select your widgets

Finished!

I hope this small tutorial will help you to improve your setup. It is obviously not complete but easy enough to move on.

Top comments (12)

Simon Wicki • Jan 9 '22

First time I saw the toolbar feature in a CLI, sweet. Time to toy around with that one.

I can recommend these two tools to improve the Git experience on the CLI:

diff-so-fancy: better visualisation of git diff
git lg: better visualisation than git log

Thomas Bredillet • Jan 9 '22

For install this two plugins :

git clone github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosugge... ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
git clone github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-hi... ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting