English is not my mother tongue and i’m trying to improve my knowledge, any feedback is appreciated.
iTerm2 is my favourite terminal app since the day is started using a Mac. I always wanted to customize it to obtain a colorful and less ugly terminal.
Unfortunately i was never able to obtain a decent result, until today.
I decided to write this little guide for some reasons, first of all i need a tutorial for the next time that i’ll need to customize iTerm. I also need to improve my english and so i decided to write this little post (maybe i will write some other posts in the future).
Before starting i apologise for my english and also for the tutorial because it’s possible that i forgot something (it’s night and it’s really late).
- First of all you need to Install iTerm2, i recommend you to use the Nightly build. You can download it from here.
- Now install oh-my-zsh, open iTerm2 and paste the following command:
sh -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)”
- Open iTerm2 and paste this command:
- The repo that you’ve just cloned contains three files, the first one is “md.itermcolors”, this is the color profile that we will use in iTerm2. Open iTerm2’s preferences and go to Profiles->Colors. Click on “Color Presets” and the on Import. Select the md.itermcolors file.
- Now, we can enable the “Minimal Theme”. This theme allows us to have a status bar with the same color that we use in the terminal window.
In the iTerm Preferences go to Appareance -> General and select the “Minimal” Theme
- Now we need to install the powerlevel9k Theme for iTerm and the Nerd Fonts. Paste the following commands in iTerm2:
brew tap sambadevi/powerlevel9k
brew install powerlevel9k
brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew cask install font-hack-nerd-font
- The last time I tried to setup iTerm I had some problems with powerlevel9k. I installed it but iTerm was not able to find the path of this theme. In the Github repo you cloned, you can find a folder called “powerlevel9k”. If you have problems with powerlevel9k you can just copy this folder in the path “/Users/YOUR_USER_NAME”
- In iTerm open the preferences and go to Profile->Text, select the Hack Nerd Font as shown in the screenshot:
- Copy the .zshrc file in the path “/Users/YOUR-USER”
- When you launch iTerm2 you should find something like this:
- Now the last step, we need to install neofetch:
brew install neofetch
- Copy the config.conf file that you find in the repo to the Path ./config/neofetch
- Reboot iTerm2, you should find this final result.
Using macOS Big Sur I faced a problem with permissions, in particular I had to launch the following two commands to solve the problem:
compaudit | xargs chmod g-w,o-w /usr/local/share/zsh
compaudit | xargs chmod g-w,o-w /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions
To remove the last login message create an empty file ~/.hushlogin.
Sources:
- https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-you-can-style-your-terminal-like-medium-freecodecamp-or-any-way-you-want-f499234d48bc
- https://medium.com/the-code-review/make-your-terminal-more-colourful-and-productive-with-iterm2-and-zsh-11b91607b98c
- https://medium.com/the-code-review/powerlevel9k-personalise-your-prompt-for-any-programming-language-68974c127c63
- https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k/wiki/Show-Off-Your-Config
- https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch
- https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/wiki/Customizing-Info
- https://github.com/MartinSeeler/iterm2-material-design
