Mac OS terminal looks old and bit dull. We will see here how to install and customize terminal.

Below steps are for my mac terminal setup. You can follow to install and customize your terminal the way you require.

I use iTerm terminal app for Mac OS and Oh-My-ZSH framework to customize iTerm. Oh-My-ZSH provides dotfile configuration, themes and plugins to customize the terminal. (dotfile is nothing but .zshrc file in your home folder)

How to install

iTerm2

You can install using homebrew

brew cask install iterm2

or you can download and install iTerm2

Pros of using iTerm2 is

  • Highly customizable
  • Vast keyboard shortcuts (I rarely use mouse in iTerm)

Wide array of color schemes available for download iTerm2colorschemes. You can download and import based on your preference. The one I use is “Solarized Dark”

Oh-My-Zsh

Install using shell

Open iTerm2 and run bellow command to install oh-My-ZSH.

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

Setting theme

Oh-My-ZSH comes with set of themes, the one I use is “agnoster”. To set theme edit ~/.zshrc and set ZSH_THEME="agnoster".

List of oh-My-ZSH themes, you can see the preview here.

Enabling plugins