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Elevate Your Terminal Experience on The Mac 🧘‍♂️

Duncan Lew on November 05, 2022

The key ingredients to spice up your terminal are Oh My Zsh, Oh My Posh, and Fig The macOS operating system comes preinstalled with a de...
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leob

Sorry, but not for me ... the default terminal with old-fashioned bash and boring green on black colors works just fine for me - all of this tinkering (which I've done a lot in the past, way too much in fact) takes tons of time, there's only 24 hours in a day ... but kudos for this very neat and thorough write-up.

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Nikola Stojaković

all of this tinkering (which I've done a lot in the past, way too much in fact) takes tons of time

Depends on what you're doing. Setting up OhMyZsh with Powerlevel10k takes less than 5 minutes and everything works perfectly. I never had to debug anything, and it's quite useful to see on which branch you are, what version of runtime you're using and how long some operation took, right there from terminal. It makes me way faster than I would be on a plain old bash.

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leob

Most of the things that you've mentioned (on which branch am I, what is my node.js version, etc) are things that I already have ... if it ain't broken, don't fix it. But if you start from scratch, yeah then it probably makes a lot of sense to start with zsh and not with bash.

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Nikola Stojaković • Edited

But you still need to do some setup, right? Plain bash doesn’t contain any of these things by default.

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leob profile image
leob

Yeah but the point is I did that already, long time ago ;)

Like I said, it's different when you start fresh, but I already had my stuff working ... "migrating" to something else makes a lot less sense then.

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eshimischi

+1 exactly for me, i tried zsh when Catalina arrived, but returned back to bash immediately

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leob • Edited

Point for me is - "Don't fix it if it ain't broken" ...

When I don't have a clearly defined problem that needs solving, then I don't want to waste time by changing my whole routine, and spending effort learning new tools.

I mean, I can almost certainly predict that a change like this is gonna be a hassle, that stuff (scripts) will likely break (which then need debugging and fixing) - so much for my productivity.

I don't need an all-singing all-dancing brightly colored hipster terminal, if I can't explain what problems it's going to solve for me - it just ain't worth it.

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eshimischi

Well, i can admit only colouring, but chose starship and colorscript for bash or you can use Warp terminal, love it

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optimal prime

super helpful, thank you! gonna give warp a shot today

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Chirag Aggarwal

Great post. I personally use a combination of iTerm2, oh my zsh and powerlevel10k, but want to try out warp after hearing about it so much. Also check out neofetch if you want to fetch your system data in the terminal in a cooler way.

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Alexey Poimtsev

+1 for powerlevel10k

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Donald Wu

try fish shell and oh my fish
also u will get good experience in terminal

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Richard Guay

I use OhMyPosh with my OhMyFish setup. It works great together.

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Alexey Poimtsev

You might like this one nushell.sh/

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Lars

Or this one cogno.rocks