My favorite terminal setup

As developer, the terminal isn’t something we can neglect. And since most of us use it a lot, we can optimize the terminal to our needs to make it an awesome experience.

On what occasions do I use the terminal?

  • to setup a development environment (homebrew, generating SSH keys,…)
  • to navigate fast to a project folder with defined aliases
  • to download the app resources (localizations.strings)
  • to update dependencies via carthage or cocoapods
  • to work with Git in general

The setup

Prerequisites

Installation walkthrough

1. Install iTerm

iTerm is a terminal that supports multiple tabs, colors, easy scrolling and much more.

2. Install OhMyZsh

zsh is a replacement for the bash shell that is used by default on mac. Zsh is highly customizale with nice themes and plugins.

note: Since MacOS Catalina, zsh has become the default shell.

3. Update default theme to Agnoster and tweak colors and font

Update the theme in the .zshrc config to Agnoster. Because of doing that, you will also need to download and install one of the patched fonts for Powerline users. You can use my .zshrc as base setup and modify to your needs.

Update the colors and font via iTerm > Preferences > Profiles

  • Go to tab Colors and change used colors by selecting Pastel (Dark background) via Color Presets
  • Go to tab Text and change the font to Menlo Regular with size 12 and continue by changing the Non-ASCII font to Meslo LG L DZ for Powerline Bold with size 12

The result

Image