Power up your Terminal using Oh-my-Zsh + iTerm2

Adesh Gautam
The Startup
Published in
3 min readJul 1, 2018

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Want your terminal look cool like the above one ? Yeah ? So lets start !

1. First we will install zsh using Homebrew.

If you haven’t installed homebrew yet, install it by pasting the below lines in your terminal.

xcode-select --installruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

2. Now install zsh

The Z shell (also known as zsh) is a Unix shell that is built on top of bash (the default shell for macOS) with additional features.

Install it using the following:

brew install zsh

3. Install Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community driven framework for managing zsh configuration. It has a lot of features to customise the terminal and a lot of themes available.

Execute it in your terminal:

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

4. Install iTerm2

For customising and installing themes we’ll require a better terminal than default one on mac.

Download and install it from the here.

5. Set zsh as the default terminal environment

a. Go to iTerm2 preferences.

b. Head to Profiles -> General.

c. Paste /usr/local/bin/zsh in the Command textbox and restart iTerm2.

Add /bin/zsh

6. Install themes

Download the zip file from here and import all the files in iTerm2 (See below in the bottom right corner) under schemes folder in the zip file.

7. Install Powerline fonts

These fonts will make your terminal fonts look better.

Copy paste the following in your terminal, restart your terminal and choose your preferred fonts (powerline ones).

git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git --depth=1
cd fonts
./install.sh
cd ..
rm -rf fonts

Congratulations 👍 😃 !!! You have successfully installed Oh My Zsh on your system.

Now your previous settings that were stored in .bash_profile located in the home directory is not active. So to activate these settings open the .bash_profile file and copy the contents and paste it at the end of .zshrc file (it is the settings file for Oh My Zsh) located in the home directory. Restart the terminal and its done.

There are many plugins available here which can further increase the functionality of your terminal.

My settings:

Theme: Argonaut

Font: Source Code Pro for Powerline (14 pt)

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