Update your font in the iterm2 preferences window 3. You can change your font to the one you just installed by updating your item2 preferences.

You can install oh-my-zsh using the following command (full instructions and documentation on their website We will use oh-my-zsh to manage and install plugins for the rest of the terminal setup described in this post. “Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer…but you may feel like one!' It provides easy access to many great plugins which can improve your terminal experience and supercharge your productivity. Is an open source framework for managing your zsh configuration. The MacOS terminal prompt ships with z shell But, for each tool, I will also provide links to documentation with instructions for specific operating systems. To install most of the plugins and command line tools.

In this post I will go through the key oh-my-zsh plugins I use to achieve the above functionality and transform the command line into a productive environment.įor this setup, however, it should be possible to install and configure this setup across operating systems.

a nice aesthetic – if you don’t enjoy using it, you probably won’t bother.

efficient directory jumping and file system navigation.

git information, virtual environment, Python version)

a prompt displaying key information (e.g.

But I would consider the following terminal attributes important for boosting productivity: Example terminal setup Key features to enable productivity #Ĭustomising the terminal is a very personal thing.Įveryone has aesthetic preferences and different functional requirements depending on their tech stack. A couple hours tailoring your terminal will pay huge dividends down the line. The key is to invest a little bit of time customising your terminal with plugins. Turning the command line into a powerful tool to supercharge your workflow. Yet, small tweaks to the configuration go a long way to improving the user experience. Who knows whether the command you are typing is correct? No syntax highlighting and no autocompletion to hold your hand. The monochrome UI of the default terminal takes no prisoners. Opening a world of efficiency and automation.īut the command line can be intimidating and unforgiving for the uninitiated. Command line expertise frees you from restrictive GUI tools and endless mouse clicks. Code editing, launching programs, multi-tasking, scripting, system admin and much more. The terminal can be a one-stop-shop for your daily tasks. There is not a more productive or versatile tool for developers to use – the terminal is the swiss-army knife of the developers' tool kit. I’ve written another article on how to setup NVM on your system to switch and maintain multiple Node.js installations easily.Why should you use the terminal as a data scientist? # Now you’ve installed and configured a good starting point. It’s worth reading the description for each plugin, because you may end up with being even more productive.

So take a minute and read through the descriptions of those plugins before enabling them. Plugins can either extend the auto-completion tab, create new key bindings or create new aliases within your terminal. zshrc file and look for plugins=(), once you find that line, list all plugins you want to use within the braces as shown here: plugins=(git bower sublime brew history node npm sudo web-search). I use only a few plugins to keep things simple. To enable them, you’ve to list them inside of your. By default, those plugins were not enabled. Their documentation on GitHub is listing which plugins were currently part of the release. OH-MY-ZSH ships with support for plugins. I’ve chosen 11pt as font-size for my setup, so apply PowerLine for Regular Font and Non-ASCII Font by clicking each Change Font button and select the PowerLine font. You can download the font from here, install this font on your system and then apply it in iTerm2 through For example, it’s displaying branches in the following way Powerline font is responsible for bringing some kind and helpful icons to the terminal. After installation has finished open ~/.zshrc in any editor and set the theme for ZSH ZSH_THEME='agnoster'.

Github iterm theme