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Connor Van Etten
Connor Van Etten

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MacOS Terminal and Alternatives

Terminal and Alternatives

The first part of customization, involves the app you use to connect to your command line. Below I will list the default app, and how to open up its customization preferences, along with other alternatives that offer more features.

Terminal App (Default)

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A lot of developer who use the default terminal window are unaware that there is a large amount of customization hidden in the preferences. By using the keyboard shortcut command + , you can open up the preferences of your terminal app. This will allow you to change profiles, font styles and size, and much more. Now within the default app you are given some features including Multiple tabs and windows, a history of all commands, and keyboard shortcuts.

iTerm2

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Commands to Install :

brew update
brew install --cask iterm2
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Main features that iTerm2 includes are split pane terminals that can even run their own prompts, a mouse-less copy and paste, search functionality without terminal output, and multiple window and tab support for ease of use.

WARP

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Commands to Install :

brew update
brew install --cask warp
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Although WARP does need a account to run, it does offer a lot of features including Multiple Shell Support (bash, zsh, fish), integration with tools like git and homebrew, autocompletion for text within terminal, a built-in file browser to help you navigate to open files directly in WARP, and more.

Hyper

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Commands to Install :

brew update
brew install --cask hyper
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Hyper is a cross-platform terminal emulator built using HTML, CSS and JS that is able to provide you with hyper customizable themes, shell support for most shells (bash, zsh, fish) and search functionality to help review your terminal output.

Thank You For Reading!

If you took the time to try out any of these new terminal apps, please reply with your favorite of these! If I left a application off of this list, let me know in the comments! Cheers!

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