DEV Community: Dylan Tientcheu

Show off your Terminal 🐱‍💻✨

Dylan Tientcheu — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 21:13:05 +0000

Lately, I have been spending a lot of productive time in local and remote terminals.

I know developers love tweaking their tools to suit themselves. Through this post I aim to provide a sharing space.

My Windows Terminal (Powershell)

Hyper Terminal
Powershell

Is this really Powershell ?

Yes I achieved that sweet left prompt with Oh-my-Posh

My WSL Terminal (Ubuntu WSL)

Fluent Terminal
Windows Subsystem Linux
Oh-my-zsh with auto-complete

Show us yours 😍

Improve your workflow with these awesome CLI tools ⚡

Dylan Tientcheu — Wed, 08 May 2019 16:59:25 +0000

Happily(?), today we are in an era where productivity is mostly achieved through smart work rather than hard work. We constantly have to be looking for faster, easier and smarter ways to achieve results.

The following tools will not only help you work faster, but you’ll also do so while having fun in your terminal.

OMG is this-… Yes this is really on Windows (Follow These Steps)

Note to Windows users : As you may notice, most of this tools are Unix based and implement some features that may not function properly on CMD or Powershell. I’d recommend you to use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Worry not, this post can show you how to make WSL the most beautiful terminal 😉

Let’s rock our CLIs.

Task Management & Planning

Yes, I know, we have a plethora of amazing task management tools on both web and desktop. However, you should give a try to those based on your terminal emulator.

Task Warrior

Taskwarrior is Free and Open Source Software that manages your TODO list from the command line. It is flexible, fast, and unobtrusive. It does its job then gets out of your way.

This is not even 1/10th of what Taskwarrior can do.

Thyme — Console Pomodoro Timer

The Pomodoro Technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo. This technique really helps with efficiency and time management. Now, Thyme is a tool that helps bring this technique to your terminal alongside big customizable options.

Moro — Work Hours Tracker

A command line tool for tracking work hours, as simple as it can get.

https://moro.js.org/

Development

Wuzz — HTTP Inspector

Think of a terminalized Postman . Wuzz is an Interactive cli tool for HTTP inspection.

https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz

FX — JSON Viewer

FX is the go-to tool for JSON processing and viewing. It’s really impressive along with all its execution commands. I’m still looking for its web/desktop-based counterpart.

https://github.com/antonmedv/fx

Serve — Fastest CLI file serving utility

Maybe you think I’m over exaggerating. Well, uhm, I’m not. Remember when you used to download python’s simpleHTTPServer or the web server for chrome app each time you needed to set up a static site in localhost? That’s all past tense. With a command as simple as npx serve directly from the folder of your static site, you get served!

howdoi—Your StackOverFlow quickie

It best describes itself this way “instant coding answers via the command line”.

The next time you’re searching for a coding answer think twice before opening your browser to read through blogs. With howdoi the answer might be closer than you think.

gitstats — print(githubCharts);

DevStats — print(allDevStats);

DevStats is a CLI application that fetches statistics from “developer sites” like StackOverflow, WakaTime and GitHub and displays them nicely. If you are a stats maniac, you can even display your daily reports and switch between days

Terminalizer& Asciinema — Terminal Recorders

Terminalizerhelps you record your terminal sessions and generate gif images. This really helps to show how a command is used.

Terminalizer

Asciinemais a great open source solution for recording terminal sessions and sharing them on the web. It aims to be a “go to” place for every command-line user who wants to share their skills with others. Or putting it differently, it’s a place to show off your geekiness.

Fun

Who really waits for npm install to get done?

Bash2048 — Play 2048 in your terminal

Play the famous 2048 game right from your terminal. (Copy the following line and paste it in your terminal).

$ bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mydzor/bash2048/master/bash2048.sh)

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mydzor/bash2048/master/bash2048.sh)

TextMeme

Generate good looking text memes like the one below, right from your terminal

https://github.com/beatfreaker/text-meme-cli

CLI Typer—Practice Dactylography like in 2003

Practice touch typing in the commandline and measure your skills.

Miscellaneous

Speed test — Internet Speed Test

Git is acting strange? Maybe you need a quick connection test. Let speed test ping from your terminal.

Overtime-cli

Easy time-overlap tables for remote teams.

https://github.com/diit/overtime-cli

Feeling the list is too short?

These are all awesome tools that awesome devs built to help the community.

You know what is even more awesome? An awesome list of awesome lists containing awesome CLI tools 🦄

Make sure to check those out and leave some stars on the repos.

You may leave a c_lap_👏🏾 if you enjoyed the read.

Dylan Tientcheu (@DylanTientcheu) | Twitter

Transforming your ugly Windows terminal to a Unicorn

Dylan Tientcheu — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 13:31:00 +0000

This is what we are aiming for

You are on Windows and you often hear other platforms users bragging along with their super ‘rainbow spitting’ command prompt. Worry not, you too can get an awesome looking terminal.

The steps to follow are listed below:

1. Install WSL

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 (clear and easy steps to install WSL).

2. Installing Your Terminal

The result above is achieved with Fluent Terminal by Felixse. This terminal is just great on Windows because it smoothly replaces Powershell or CMD keeping all the features and enabling you to easily switch between both at anytime. It also comes with great performance and a beautiful settings interface.

Did I say it respects Windows Fluent Design ? 😍

This software is still in early development stages, but it’s stable enough (for me) to work with it as a default terminal. The easiest steps to install Fluent Terminal is :

Install Chocolatey

From an elevated/admin shell, execute choco install fluent-terminal

Another beautiful result could be obtained with Hyper Terminal (regardless of your OS — because Hyper is cross platform) following this tutorial from Syed Sharizal, from which this tutorial was inspired 💪🏾.

3. Setting up Fluent Terminal

Choosing your terminal’s profile

In order to get a terminal with UNIX functionalities we have to switch to WSL, simply because, this cannot be achieved with the Windows Command nor the Powershell.

4. Install ZSH

Run sudo apt-get install zsh
Open your bash_profile vim ~/.bashrc — Get your vim knowledge straight with this cheatsheet.
Set your ZSH as default (follow the #comments to find your way through the files).

bash -c zsh
# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
# for examples

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
case $- in
 \*i\*) ;;
 \*) return;;
esac

5. Install Oh My ZSH

Oh My Zsh is a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. It comes bundled with thousands of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout…

To install Oh My ZSH run this command.

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

6. Configuring Oh My ZSH

By now you already have the horse 🐴. It’s time to make it a unicorn 🦄.

Through the following steps, feel free to configure everything to your desire and feels;

Theming your OMZ — Install PowerLevel9K

git clone https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k

Select this theme in your ~/.zshrc by adding this line

ZSH\_THEME="powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k"

Installing Powerline fonts

These fonts help you get the arrows and git icons you can see on the left part of the prompt.

I use nerd fonts rather than powerline fonts because I think the latter’s repository is less maintained.

Nerd Fonts is a project that patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular ‘iconic fonts’ such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others.

Open http://nerdfonts.com/
Go to downloads, then choose your font and download it
Install it as you’d install any font on windows
Add the font to Fluent Terminal — Settings → Terminal → Font family
Add the NerdFont compatibility using vim .zshrc then add the following line just under the previous ZSH_THEME

POWERLEVEL9K\_MODE='nerdfont-complete'

Further customizations

Once you have powerlevel9k, everything is pretty much on your side. You can configure it to your liking.

These are resources to help you customize

🦄 — My own .zshrc config

🦄 — Powerlevel9k customization docs

🦄 — Nerds showing off their config — along with config files

More…

If ever some information sound off or “new” to you. Remember, this tutorial was inspired from many others some are below