Advanced Setup

Author

Walter Wiggins

Published

December 20, 2024

These are optional steps for those interested in taking advantage of some advanced tools for the CLI. I find these tools very useful, but it takes a fair amount of time to get everything installed and running. There’s also the possibility that you’ll spend a considerable amount of time tweaking things to your liking…

Also, if you’re a MacOS user and haven’t yet installed the Xcode Developer Command Line Tools, return to the Basic Setup Guide and do this first.

Zsh: the Z shell

Zsh now comes standard on most recent versions of MacOS, but traditionally the default shell on MacOS and most Linux distributions has been bash. zsh is thus considered to be an alternative shell. It offers some really nice features like improved tab-completion (probably the most routinely useful one), syntax highlighting, and extended “globbing” - I’ll explain the last one later in a post.

Let’s start by installing iTerm2, Homebrew, Oh My Zsh and Powerline fonts to make sure everything runs smoothly once we actually start to use the shell.

  1. Install iTerm2 from the website. iTerm2 is a more customizable terminal emulator for MacOS.
  2. Open iTerm2. You can use Spotlight {CMD+SPACE}, then type iTerm.
  3. Install Homebrew by copying and pasting the command below into your terminal. Click the link to learn more about this package manager for MacOS.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh is a collection of themes for taking full advantage of Zsh and “beautifying your shell”. By installing Xcode Command Line Tools, you now have git, a version management command line tool that you’ll be using a lot, if you continue to use this site.

We’ll install Oh-My-Zsh from Robby Russell’s GitHub repository (or ‘repo’).

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Once this is is done, you’ll be running your fancy new Zsh with Oh My Zsh. The default theme is robbyrussell. We’ll change that shortly, though you can certainly keep it if you like it.

Powerline Fonts

Many Oh My Zsh themes require a Powerline font to be rendered properly in the terminal. So, naturally, we’ll install those here to keep things running smoothly as we proceed. (Note: In the code block below, the # indicates a comment, not a command.) Back to our new friend git…

# clone the Powerline fonts repo to your machine
git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git --depth=1

# run the install script
cd fonts
./install.sh

# clean up the files you no longer need
cd ..
rm -rf fonts

Now, head to “Preferences” in iTerm2 by pressing {CMD + ,}. Then go to “Profiles > Text” to set the “Regular” and non-ASCII fonts to one of your newly installed Powerline fonts (I recommend SourceCodePro for starters). I also recommend switching your color palette to “Solarized”, as it plays nicely with Oh My Zsh.

Configuring Zsh and Oh My Zsh with Nano

Most commonly, people configure Zsh in their .zshrc file. Installing OMZ will prepopulate yours with some useful stuff. Running ls in ~ won’t show you “dotfiles” (e.g. .zshrc) by default. For that, you should run ls -a (or la - an “alias” or shortcut for the preceding command). You should see something similar to what I’ve shown below, though everyone will probably have many other files and folders that get printed to the standard output (or “stdout”) when they run this command.

$ ls -a
-rw-------  1 walter walter  496 Oct  6 22:36 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--  1 walter walter  220 Oct  6 22:50 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x 11 walter walter 4.0K Oct  6 22:46 .oh-my-zsh
-rw-------  1 walter walter  56K Nov 15 11:35 .zsh_history
-rw-r--r--  1 walter walter 3.8K Nov 15 11:25 .zshrc
# ... with other files mixed in

Now, on to configuring Zsh in .zshrc. The first thing you should do is decide which text editor you want to use. Your options are a graphical text editor or one of the built-in text editors that run in the shell itself. For simplicity, we’ll go with nano - one of the built-in options. It’s far easier to use than vi or vim and simpler than opening a separate window every time you want to make a minor change to your config. Entering nano ~/.zshrc will launch nano with your config file in the editor. At the bottom of the window, you should see the commands available to you (FYI: ^G is shorthand for {CTRL + G}). After you make changes, you will need to press ^O (letter O, not number) to “write out” (i.e. save) your changes before you ^X (exit). Also, you’ll be navigating with the keyboard as your mouse won’t work.

Everything you see in your .zshrc has been added by OMZ. The first thing we’ll do is change the theme. Navigate to the line that says ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell". We’re going to change the theme to “agnoster”, so delete “robbyrussell” and replace it with “agnoster” such that the line now looks like this ZSH_THEME="agnoster". Then ^O and ^X. Now you’ve saved your changes, exited nano and are back in Zsh…but everything looks the same.

To see the effects of your changes to the config, you’ll have to reload your shell. The command for this is source ~/.zshrc. Over time, you may find yourself tweaking your shell config regularly, adding or changing different aliases, etc. Thus, I recommend you go ahead and add the following lines to your .zshrc under # Aliases. You may wish to delete the existing ones.

alias zshconfig="nano ~/.zshrc"
alias reload="source ~/.zshrc"

You will have to reload your shell profile with the full command before you can use your new aliases. But after you do that, you’ll be able to edit your config in nano simply by entering zshconfig, then reload when you’re done.

If you are using the VS Code editor, you can replace the nano command with the code command.