How to a get beautiful and efficient terminal on MacOS

You find the basic Terminal app of MacOS obscure ? Follow this guide and you will rediscover the power of terminal.

Final result

Why custom and improve your terminal is important ?

🏎 Be much more productive

🔀 Have a better vision on git status (avoid careless mistakes)

🎨 Have pleasure to use it every day

Step 1: Install iTerm2

First, forget the Terminal app of MacOS and download iTerm : https://iterm2.com.

Once iTerm installed, go to Preferences and then Appearance and select Minimal for the theme to improve the design.

Step 2: Install ZSH

Next step is to install zsh.

“Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter.”

You need to have brew installed on your Mac (if not check https://brew.sh).

To install :

brew install zsh

Step 3: Install oh-my-zsh

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

Sounds boring. Let’s try again.

Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer…but you may feel like one.”

To install:

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

Step 4: Configure Powerlevel10k

“Powerlevel10k is a theme for Zsh. It emphasizes speed, flexibility and out-of-the-box experience.”

First:

brew install romkatv/powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k

Then:

echo 'source /usr/local/opt/powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k.zsh-theme' >>~/.zshrc

Restart your terminal to make changes available.

Finally tap this command and follow the instruction:

p10k configure

Step 5: Install oh-my-zsh plugins

For me, this 2 plugins are the main plugins you’ll need. (Find more here https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Plugins)

1. syntax-highlighting

“Add syntax highlighting to your Zsh. Make sure you load this before zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search or they will both break.”

brew install zsh-syntax-highlighting

Add add this line at the end of you .zshrc:

source /usr/local/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

Restart your terminal

2. autosuggestions

brew install zsh-autosuggestions

Add add this line at the end of you .zshrc:

source /usr/local/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

Restart your terminal

Step 6: Design tips

1. Add a liltle of transparency

In your iTerm params you can add a little of transparency to your window.

2. About fonts

I use Monaco for main font and MesloNF for non-ASCII characters

3. Colors theme

I use a custom theme based on Material colors.

Download it from https://github.com/jgrandchavin/iterms_colors_themes.

To install, go there and then import the .itermcolors file and select it in the list after.

Thanks for reading ! Hopes your terminal will become more powerful 🚀