Created: 2022-04-03 | Last update: 2022-04-24

Better Terminal Experience¶

Terminal Screenshot

Introduction¶

I have been using terminal for a long time, it's one of my essential tools for my everyday work and hobbies.
The default terminal experience is not very user friendly, and I find it sometimes frustrating to use for basic tasks.
So I decided to make a better terminal experience for macOS and Linux without too much effort from user side.
This guide will help you to install and configure the **better terminal experience in less than 5 minutes.

Better Terminal Experience guide based on ZSH Shell with Oh My Zsh on top of it.
Using built-in theme called Bira, zsh auto suggestions plugin that suggests commands as you type based on history and completions and zsh syntax highlighting plugin that highlighting of commands whilst they are typed at a zsh prompt into an interactive terminal.

What's ZSH¶

Z-shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a shell scripting command interpreter. Zsh is an enhanced Bourne shell with many enhancements, including some Bash, ksh and tcsh features.

What's Oh-My-Zsh¶

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

MacOS Installation¶

My personal preference is to use iTerm2 as a replacement for macOS default Terminal.

Homebrew Package Manager¶

We need a package manager to install all the required packages. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. if you don't have it, you can install it with the following command:

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

Requirements Installation¶

Using Homebrew, we can install the following packages: zsh, git, wget, zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting

brew install git wget zsh zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting

Oh My Zsh Installation¶

We can proceed to install Oh My Zsh with the following command:

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

Answer Yes when asked to change the default shell to zsh.

Oh My Zsh Configuration¶

Oh My Zsh crates a default configuration file called .zshrc in the user's home directory.

We need to edit the configuration file. You can use any editor to edit the file.

nano example:

nano ~/.zshrc

We need to add or change the following lines to the configuration file:

Find the theme and change it to bira

ZSH_THEME="bira"

find the plugins and change it to the following:

plugins=(git colored-man-pages docker docker-compose iterm2 node npm brew pip colorize macos pyenv colorize adb aws command-not-found virtualenv poetry)

Since we have intel and arm based macs the homebrew path is different. So i've made it to load the proper plugins based on the cpu architecture.
The autosuggestions plugin has a bug with copy and paste so there is a workaround for that.
Append the following to the end of the config:

# Loads the plugins from /usr/local for intel based
if [ $(arch) = "i386" ]; then
  source /usr/local/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh
  source /usr/local/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh
fi

# Loads the plugins from /opt/homebrew/ for arm based
if [ $(arch) = "arm64" ]; then
  source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh
  source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh
fi

# Fix for Slow zsh-autosuggestions copy&paste
autoload -Uz bracketed-paste-magic
zle -N bracketed-paste bracketed-paste-magic
zstyle ':bracketed-paste-magic' active-widgets '.self-*'

Save and exit the file.
Open new terminal windown and enjoy Better Terminal Experience!

Linux Installation¶

The instructions bellow are for Debian Linux with apt as package manager. If you are using another package manager, just change the commands to install the packages.

Requirements¶

git
zsh
wget

Install the following requirements packages with the following commands:

apt install -y git zsh wget

Oh My Zsh¶

We can proceed to install Oh My Zsh with the following command:

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

Answer Yes when asked to change the default shell to zsh.

Install Autosuggestions, Syntax-Highlighting Plugins using git clone:

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ~/.zsh/zsh-autosuggestions
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting ~/.zsh/zsh-syntax-highlighting

Auto Config Installation¶

Danger

The following commands will overwrite your current config if exists.

Make sure you have a backup of your config before proceeding!!!

wget -O ~/.zshrc https://3os.org/assets/zshrc_config

For non root user eddit the config file:

nano ~/.zshrc

Change the export ZSH="users-home-dir-path" to users' home directory path.

# Path to your oh-my-zsh installation.
export ZSH="/home/${USER}/.oh-my-zsh"

Oh My Zsh Manual Configuration¶