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I was talking with my fellow interns about our personal workspace setups, and I was super surprised when two of them said they use the default Mac terminal.app with no customization whatsoever. I thought I was going to blow their mind when I whipped out my spiffy, colourful, dark-theme terminal prompt, but to my surprise, they were having none of it.

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”Yeah, but it does the same stuff, so what’s the point?”, one of them said.

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And then I froze… I didn’t have a response. Was it true? Was my gorgeous, fully customized terminal equivalent to the default, out-of-the-box version despite the countless hours I’ve devoted to the iterative process of creative the perfect command prompt? Was everything a waste of time?

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Or was I just so used to my power-user-enabled, ergonimically-crafted, beeaaauuutiful, that the advantages became second nature? Was I so comfortable with the brainchild I created that I started to take it for granted?

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The answer is… probably something in between. Anyways here’s a little guide on how I set up my terminal. Obviously you can (and should) change any of the configurations to your liking.

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Note: This guide only focuses on the aesthetic changes. I’ll be making another post about the added features and benefits of some of these changes.

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0. Install Brew

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Homebrew is a package manager for Mac (and Linux). If you’re doing any kind of software dev stuff on your Mac, you’ll probably end up using it to install packages and dependencies.

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In your command prompt, run the following command:

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/usr/bin/ruby -e \"$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)\"
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1. Set Up iTerm2

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iTerm2 offers a lot of benefits over the default Mac terminal… but I mostly use it because it supports a lot of different colours.

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Install iTerm2

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Install iTerm2 here or run the following command:

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brew cask install iterm2
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Customize Colours

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Open the application and navigate to the Colors tab (iTerm2 -> Preferences -> Profiles -> Colors).

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\"iTerm2

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In the bottom right corner, you can select a preset. I’m rocking with a slightly altered Dracula theme I think… I’m not sure. But you can download my presets here. Here’s a side by side comparison with meemoo on the left and yubah on the right:

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\"iTerm2

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Change Font

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Navigate to the Text tab (iTerm2 -> Preferences -> Profiles -> Text). At the bottom of the tab, you’ll want to change the font that supports special symbols. You can download my preferred fonts here, or you can check out this selection.

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Configure Other iTerm2 Settings

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Spend some time looking around the other settings tabs and change things to your liking. I don’t remember what I changed in here, but it should mostly be preference. One thing I have enabled is Unlimited scrollback from the Terminal tab (iTerm2 -> Preferences -> Profiles -> Terminal), which lets you scroll wayyyyyyy back to see your old stuff.

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2. Set Up Zsh (and other stuff)

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By default, your Mac uses Bash. Zsh (sometimes called Z-Shell) is a fancy shmancy version of it. I’ll get into some features later. Oh my Zsh is a configuration framework for Zsh. I don’t really know what it does, but I appreciate it.

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Install Zsh

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brew install zsh zsh-completions
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Install Oh my Zsh

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

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This file houses all the custom configurations we’re about to do. Remember that whenever you make a change you’ll need to run source ~/.zshrc or restart your terminal for the changes to take effect.

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Install Powerlevel9k Theme

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I like Powerlevel9k because it’s super customizable.

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git clone https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k
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Add the theme to your ~/.zshrc file

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ZSH_THEME="powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k"
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Your prompt is gonna probably look absolutely wild, especially compared to the white, default terminal. Now is a good chance to take a look at other people’s prompts for inspiration. I think you can just copy-paste their config file into yours. Here is my personal configuration (what you saw in the screenshots). I think mine is pretty humble, but still makes me feel like I’m hacking the mainframe.

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Stylize Your Prompt

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There’s a ton of options, all of which are explained in the docs, but I’ll walk through the user config part of my ~/.zshrc. I’m going to ignore the plugins and some other utility stuff and just focus on the aesthetics, since I plan on covering functionality and additional features in another post.

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The first line sets what prompt segments you want to see. I wanted a simple design so my values are dir (directory: show the directory you’re in) and vcs (version control system: show some helpful git stuff). The lines after that are setting the symbol for separators, of which I don’t have any.

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POWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(dir vcs)\nPOWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_SEGMENT_SEPARATOR=' '\nPOWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_SUBSEGMENT_SEPARATOR=' '\nPOWERLEVEL9K_WHITESPACE_BETWEEN_LEFT_SEGMENTS=''
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The following line removes the prompt on the right hand side. I considered adding on to track the time, but it felt too cluttered to me.

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POWERLEVEL9K_DISABLE_RPROMPT=true
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You can set the number of subdirectories to go down before it starts shortening the prompt. In my workspace setup, my terminal usually only has half of the screen, and I don’t want a long directory wrapping around and taking up two lines, so after the 5th directory it will shave them off the front.

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POWERLEVEL9K_SHORTEN_DIR_LENGTH=5
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\"subdirectories

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My prompt shows the directory and vsc information on one line, and the input on another. You can add this new line functionality by inserting the following lines. I chose to not have a prompt prefix on the first line, but use the class $ on the one where I actually type stuff.

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POWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ON_NEWLINE=true\nPOWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ADD_NEWLINE=true\nPOWERLEVEL9K_MULTILINE_FIRST_PROMPT_PREFIX=''\nPOWERLEVEL9K_MULTILINE_LAST_PROMPT_PREFIX='$ '
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By default, Powerlevel9k has a bunch of icons in the prompt. I didn’t love it so I set them to a blank string.

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POWERLEVEL9K_ETC_ICON=''\nPOWERLEVEL9K_FOLDER_ICON=''\nPOWERLEVEL9K_HOME_ICON=''\nPOWERLEVEL9K_HOME_SUB_ICON=''\nPOWERLEVEL9K_VCS_BRANCH_ICON=''
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The rest of the prompt config lines are for colours. There are foreground and background components for each section of the prompt (dir, vsc, etc.); however, some of the sections can have different colours depending on what directory you’re in, the status of your git repository, and a couple of other things. You can find all the supported colours by running this snippet in your terminal:

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for code ({000..255}) print -P -- "$code: %F{$code}This is how your text would look like%f"
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Voila, if you’ve followed those steps (and used a little bit of critical thinking to cover the gaps I missed) you should have a nifty, new terminal set up just the way you like it (at least aesthetically). In the near future I’m going to post a Part 2 where I’ll cover some cool functionality of your new prompt, my favourite plugins, and some other technical things.

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