5min guide to an awesome terminal

If you spend some time using your terminal, I'm sure that at least once you have wished for a better experience when working with the terminal, and that's what we'll achieve today.

For this terminal configuration we'll be using Zsh, Oh My Zsh, Powerlevel10k, exa, and a custom font to have access to unicode icons on the terminal.

TL;DR

In a rush? No problem! I've made a script to automatically install and setup the tools mentioned in this article, simply run the following command and you should be good to go:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lily-gh/devtools/main/p10k/spice_up_my_terminal.sh)"        

?? Note: you'll still need to manually select the MesloLGS NF font family in your terminal's settings.

Installing & setting up the required software

Use homebrew to install zsh and exa:

brew install zsh exa        

Install Oh My Zsh:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"        

Download Powerlevel10k theme:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k        

Set Powerlevel10k as your zsh theme by changing the ZSH_THEME line in your ~/.zshrc file to:

ZSH_THEME="powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k"        

Download & install the custom font

Download these font files:

• MesloLGS NF Regular
• MesloLGS NF Bold
• MesloLGS NF Italic
• MesloLGS NF Bold Italic

Install the font files by double clicking each one and then clicking on "Install Font".

Configure your terminal to use the downloaded font by going into your terminal settings and choosing the "MesloLGS NF" font family. If you're not sure about how to set up downloaded font in your terminal, take a look on the official Powerlevel10k guide for how to set it up.

With these steps done, you can copy my Powerlevel 10k configuration into your ~/.p10k.zsh file to have the same settings as I do. (create the file in case it doesn't exist yet.)

If you copied my settings file with the link above, make sure to also add these lines to your ~/.zshrc file in order make p10k's configuration wizard not show up every time you start your terminal:

# To customize prompt, run `p10k configure` or edit ~/.p10k.zsh
[[ ! -f ~/.p10k.zsh ]] || source ~/.p10k.zsh        

Alternatively, you can start p10k's configuration wizard with the "p10k configure" command in your terminal and follow the prompts to try out different configuration options.

Now your terminal should already look something like this (restart your terminal if the changes are not applied):

Making file listing nicer

We'll use exa to bring some colors and better sorting options when listing files on the terminal. I've set it to sort alphabetically and with folders on top. To do the same, you'll need to add a few aliases to your ~/.zshrc configuration file:

# checks if exa command is available before setting the aliase
if [ -x "$(command -v exa)" ]; then
??? alias ls="exa -1 --classify --group-directories-first"
??? alias ll="exa --long --header --classify --icons --group-directories-first --no-permissions"
??? alias lp="exa --long --header --classify --icons --group-directories-first"
??? alias la="exa -a --long --header --classify --icons --group-directories-first"
??? alias lt="exa --tree --long --header --classify --icons --group-directories-first"
??? alias t="exa --tree --header --classify --icons --group-directories-first"
fi        

Feel free to change these configurations based on exa's documentation.

This is how file listing should look like with above settings:

Done!

That's all you need to have an improved terminal experience. ??????

Keep reading for a few extra things.

Extras

Use bat ?? instead of cat ??

Bat adds syntax highlighting when listing the contents of a file.

This is how it looks like:

Install it with homebrew:

brew install bat        

You can add an alias in your ~/.zshrc file to replace the cat command with bat:

alias cat="bat -n"        

To customize it further, you can create a .bat.conf config file and export a BAT_CONFIG_PATH variable pointing to it in your ~/.zshrc file:

export BAT_CONFIG_PATH=path/to/.bat.conf        

This is what I have in my .bat.conf file:

# Set the theme to "OneHalfLight

--theme="OneHalfLight"

# Remove paging by default

--paging=never"        

fzf

You know you ran a command before, and now you need it again, but can't recall what the exact command was? Well, fzf let's you easily search for it when you hit ctrl+r and start typing your search term. Once you find what you want, just press enter to insert it on the terminal.

Zsh already brings some of this functionality, but I feel that fzf delivers a better experience.

Install fzf with homebrew:

brew install fzf
        

Finish setting it up with this command (answer 'y' for the questions that show up):

$(brew --prefix)/opt/fzf/install        

That's it, this is how fzf search looks like:

Changing Powerlevel10k colors

If you'd like to change the colors used for Powerlevel10k, you can do so by changing them in your ~/.p10k.zsh configuration file.

These are the lines I have changed to achieve my current color settings:

typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_VCS_CLEAN_BACKGROUND=039
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_VCS_MODIFIED_BACKGROUND=214
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_VCS_UNTRACKED_BACKGROUND=039
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_VCS_CONFLICTED_BACKGROUND=214
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_COMMAND_EXECUTION_TIME_BACKGROUND=039
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_RAM_BACKGROUND=202
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_DIR_BACKGROUND=171
typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_OS_ICON_BACKGROUND=040        

To check out how each of the available colors look like in your terminal, you can run this command:

for i in {0..255}; do print -Pn "%K{$i}? %k%F{$i}${(l:3::0:)i}%f " ${${(M)$((i%6)):#3}:+$'\n'}; done

For reference, this is the output of the command in my terminal:

Hyperterm summon

If you're also using Hyper.is as your terminal, I highly recommend installing hyperterm-summon, it enables you to summon the terminal from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut.

Install it with:

hyper i hyperterm-summon        

I have changed the default shortcut to be "cmd + ." - for that you'll need to add a "summon" block to your ~/.hyper.js configuration file:

module.exports = 
??? config: {
??????? // other configuration omitted
??????? summon: {
????????? hideDock: false,
????????? hideOnBlur: false,
????????? hotkey: 'Super+.',
??????? }
??? }
}{        

Note: you need to have Hyper running before being able to summon it from anywhere.

Thank you ??

Thank you for reading through this article.?If you found it helpful, make sure to share it so that more people can improve their terminal experience.

For more customization options, don't forget to check out the official documentation of the tools we installed:

• Powerlevel10k
• exa
• bat
• fzf