5 Tips to Supercharge Your Terminal

Sometimes using the terminal can be a nightmare. I've compiled a few tips that can help make the terminal less scary and more enjoyable.

1: Use the Right Tools

Two tools are essential for improving your terminal: your app and your shell.

For my app I use iTerm2. It solves a lot of the headaches associated with the default Terminal.app. Other popular choices are hyper and alacritty.

For my shell I use oh my zsh. The primary benefit of oh-my-zsh is the "plugins" written by other users (more on this later).

2: Love your theme and prompt

You should find a theme and prompt that (1) you enjoy using and (2) presents useful information at a glance.

I enjoy dark mode with bright, easy to read colors. You can see I have a few useful snippets of information in my prompt:

• The arrow at the beginning tells me if the previous command was successful (green) or failed (red)
• The directory I'm currently in (with my $HOME represented as ~)
• The branch I'm currently on
• A yellow x if my branch is in a "dirty state"

You can browse available oh-my-zsh themes here.

Here's the code for the prompt I use:

function get_pwd() {
  echo "${PWD/$HOME/~}"
}

local ret_status="%(?:%{$fg_bold[green]%}➜ :%{$fg_bold[red]%}➜ )"
PROMPT='${ret_status}%{$fg[cyan]%} $(get_pwd)%{$reset_color%}$(git_prompt_info) '

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_PREFIX="%{$fg_bold[blue]%} (%{$fg[red]%}"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_SUFFIX="%{$reset_color%}"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[blue]%}) %{$fg[yellow]%}✗"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_CLEAN="%{$fg[blue]%})"

3: Install the right plugins

plugins=(
  git
  copyfile
)

For oh-my-zsh, you should browse the list of awesome zsh plugins. Installing these plugins is easy: you can make a list of them in your .zshrc, open a new terminal window, and they'll magically work. Here's a few of my favorites.

Git

The git plugin gives you a ton of useful aliases and functions that cuts out a lot of characters from your git commands.

Autosuggestions

Super useful tool that gives you autocomplete without having to comb through history.

Diff-so-fancy

This one isn't an oh-my-zsh plugin, but I've found diff-so-fancy to be invaluable because it makes git diff output so much easier to read.

4: Alias your common operations

When you come across a long command that you struggle to remember, create an alias for it!

For example, I enjoy having a command gls that acts like ls, but for my git branches, listing them in priority of most recently used. Here's how I defined that alias and an example usage:

# in your .zshrc
alias gls="git for-each-ref --count=30 --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(refname:short)'"

5: Create a git repo for your dotfiles

Inevitably, when you're exploring new terminal setups, you'll break something and want to revert to a previous state. Or you'll get a new computer, switch jobs, etc and struggle to get your previous setup working again.

A former (very talented) coworker of mine introduced to me to the dotfile setup I use now. It's helped me undo some terrible errors, and makes it painless to switch to new computer.

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Thanks for reading! Let me know your favorite terminal tips in the comments.