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Carlos Cruz
Carlos Cruz

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styled terminal with iTerm

New iTerm2 version 3.3.1 comes with a complete new and good looking features.

I just shared a tweet about how my terminal looks and immediately start receiving some questions about how to get there.

Liquid error: internal

ok, so let's start!

Getting start

Disclaimer: if you have installed iTerm 3.3.1, zsh, oh-my-zsh and spaceship_prompt jump to configuration section

iTerm2

To start, we need to download and install iTerm.
Follow the steps as a normal application.

ZSH

Zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language

This is a may pain full step, and this would change depending on your configuration. So the best I can do is share the most complete guide that I found to do it - Installing zsh

Oh-my-zsh

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration

Use the official documentations of Oh-my-zsh to install it - Installing oh-my-zsh

You can get deeper in oh-my-zsh and their configuration, but this is not the scope of this post. So the most important you need to understand about it is his entry configuration file. ~/.zshrc here you can control themes and plugins.

spaceship-prompt

Spaceship is a minimalistic, powerful and extremely customizable Zsh prompt

Follow the installation options in spaceship-prompt project - spaceship-prompt installation

Configuration

Ok so now our iTerm should be looking nice. But we can add some configuration to get here:
carcruz-iterm

tabs in left panel

To change the tabs to be located at left, just go to iTerm > Preferences > Appearance there, in General you will see Tab bar location, set that to Left

You also can customize the icon and session title, to do that, simple go to iTerm > Preferences > Profiles, General and in Basics section going to see the Icon and Title inputs.

status bar

This is a new super cool ui improvement of iTerm, to enabled it go to iTerm > Preferences > Profiles then in the left sub sections go to Session. There at the bottom, you will find the enabled check and the configuration link, where you can customize which components put on your bar. It's simple just drag and drop the components.

To change the location of the bar, just go to iTerm > Preferences > Appearance, there in General you will see Status bar location, set that to Bottom

customize spaceship-prompt

Well this is like a bonus, in my case I wanted that the git branch indicator only shows in status bar, so I had to disable it in spaceship-prompt. To do that, go to you zsh config file(~/.zshrc in normal case) and add this config flag

SPACESHIP_GIT_BRANCH_SHOW="false"

Save the changes and restart iTerm


Thanks for read! If have any questions or comments leave bellow 🙂

Pura vida 🇨🇷✌🏼

Top comments (3)

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Michael Tharrington • Edited

Pura vida indeed!

So, totally unrelated to the majority of this post, but I'm moving to Costa Rica in a month and am super excited. Ready to hear a lot more "pura vidas" in my near future.

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Carlos Cruz

It's super cool to find people in the community that comes to Costa Rica 🇨🇷

Definitely you going to hear a lot of "pura vida"!

Feel free to DM me any question about the country and/or places to know :)

email: me@carcruzcast.com
twitter: @carcruzcast

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Michael Tharrington

Thank you so much, Carlos!

I'm headed to Puerto Viejo - not sure if you're familiar with it. My wife is a vet and is going to try and work at the Jaguar rescue center there.

Thanks for the contact info! I may be hitting you up soon. :-)