Elegant Developer Experience with Zsh and iTerm2

Elegant Developer Experience with Zsh and iTerm2

As a developer, I spend a lot of time in my terminal doing the following tasks:

Navigating the file system

Manipulating files (creating, deleting, reading and updating)

Executing Git commands

Running tests

And more...

I customize my terminal using a combination of zsh and iTerm2. Zsh is a shell that is very similar to bash, but with a few enhancements. iTerm2 is a configurable terminal interface for macOS that replaces the native macOS terminal. Unfortunately, iTerm2 is not available on other platforms like Ubuntu and Windows.

Aside: Hyper vs iTerm2

Recently I also tried Hyper. Hyper is cross-platform and JavaScript-extensible (a huge plus for JavaScript developers). It also provides a very clean and minimalist look. Unfortunately, it always felt a few milliseconds slower and less responsive than iTerm2. This tiny delay led me to switch back to iTerm2 although I did find Hyper visually more appealing.

Hyper, an alternative to iTerm2

My configuration files

.zshrc

In the tutorial, I will guide you through every installation step and explain every line of .zshrc to you. If you want to reference the complete configuration file, it's available as a GitHub Gist. Note that some stuff in this file may not be applicable to you, such as MySQL and Google Cloud configurations. I will explain the relevant stuff in this tutorial.

zshColorTheme.json

This is for color theme configurations and available here. Again, I will explain the details a bit later.

Homebrew

Before we dive into the actual stuff, if you are a macOS user, I highly, highly, highlyrecommended you to have Homebrew installed. Homebrew is an easy-to-use package manager for macOS and will make many installations much much easier.

Zsh

Install zsh

Probably the following 2 steps are not necessary for Catalina users because macOS switched its default shell from bash to zsh in the Catalina updates. For older macOS versions, however, it is necessary to install zsh and make it the default shell.

Zsh can be installed through Homebrew:

brew install zsh

Once installed, you can set zsh as the default shell with the following command:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

Configure zsh extensions

Configuration for zsh is done in the .zshrc file located in the user's home directory (i.e. ~). Whenever changes are made in .zshrc and you'd like to see the changes applied to an already open terminal session, you need to execute the source ~/.zshrccommand to propagate the changes to the current terminal session. Otherwise, you need to fully quit and restart the terminal in order to see the changes applied.

zsh-syntax-highlighting

This package highlights commands while they are being typed. Invalid commands will be highlighted in red, which helps you catch syntax errors before executing the commands.

Install zsh-syntax-highlighting with Homebrew:

brew install zsh-syntax-highlighting

Alternatively, you can install zsh-syntax-highlighting by cloning the package into your home directory:

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ~/

To enable zsh-syntax-highlighting, you need to add the following into your .zshrc:

source ./zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

More installation options can be found here.

zsh-auto-suggestions

With this package, as you type commands, you will see a suggested completion after the cursor in a light gray color. You can accept the suggestion by pressing the right arrow key. As you type, the suggestion will change dynamically.

Install zsh-auto-suggestions by cloning the package (preferably into ~/.zsh/zsh-autosuggestions, according to the offical guide):

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ~/.zsh/zsh-autosuggestions

Then add the following into your .zshrc:

source ~/.zsh/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

More installation options can be found here.

colorls

With colorls, you can list your files and folders with style! The screenshot on the right shows the end result.

Installing colorls can be a bit tricky, and I didn't find the official installation guideparticularly helpful when I installed colorls. Here are my recommened installation procedures (which worked for me):

Step 1:Install Ruby (preferably, version > 2.3) and gem. There are many ways to install Ruby and gem. I installed through RVM (Ruby Version Manager). Make sure you have the executables ruby and gem (both of which should come from RVM out of the box). Execute the commands which ruby and which gem to make sure.

Step 2:Install colorls through gem:

gem install colorls

Now you should be able to execute the colorls and see colorized output;

colorls # you can optionally put flags like:

# --dirs list only directories

# --files list only files

# --long show verbose output

# --almost-all show all files and directories

# including dot files but excluding . and ..

# --tree=2 show tree-like structure with depth = 2

# for more flags and arguments please visit the colorls documenation

# https://github.com/athityakumar/colorls#installation

Step 3:colorls also comes with automatic tab completion for file and directory names. You can press the tab key to auto complete. To take advantage of this feature, you need to source the tab_complete executable in your .zshrc file. Specifically, first find you ruby version:

ruby -v

In my case, the output is:

ruby 2.4.0p0 (2016-12-24 revision 57164) [x86_64-darwin18]

So my ruby version is 2.4.0.

Next, find out the version of your colorls:

colorls -v

My output is:

1.2.0

Knowing the version numbers of ruby and colorls, I will put the following line into my .zshrc:

source ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.0/gems/colorls-1.2.0/lib/tab_complete.sh

# replace the ruby and colorls version numbers with your own

Now you should be able to use the tab key to auto complete file and directories paths.

Step 4:

Aliasing is awesome. I often use the following command to list all files in a tree-like structure:

'colorls --group-directories-first --almost-all --files --tree=1'

However, it's cumbersome to type such a long command each and every time. With aliasing, I just need to type lf, my own custom command.

I have the following aliases in my .zshrc:

alias l='colorls --group-directories-first --almost-all --tree=1'

alias ll='colorls --group-directories-first --almost-all --long'

alias ld='colorls --group-directories-first --almost-all --dirs --tree=1'

alias lf='colorls --group-directories-first --almost-all --files --tree=1'

alias lt1='colorls --group-directories-first --almost-all --tree=1'

Replace them as you see fit and be creative!

bat for better cat

cat is a command in unix-like systems that prints file content onto the terminal. The native cat is very ugly because the output is plain, white text without any formatting and highlighting. bat stands for better cat and does exactly that! You can install with homebrew:

brew install bat

More installation options can be found here.

In fact, bat is so much better than cat that I almost never use the native catanymore. I created an alias in my .zshrc:

alias cat='bat'

Keep exploring...

The biggest reason I favor zsh over bash is that zsh's ecosystem is so diverse. Above are just some of the plugins that I think are the most essential, but there are tons of plugins available out there. Some plugins are platform-, language-specific such as plugins for Python, Docker, Visual Studio Code, AWS, etc...

iTerm2

Install iTerm2

Install iTerm 2 here.

Style iTerm2 - powerlevel9k

In order to have the same icons, font and prompt as me, you need to install powerlevel9k. You can install by cloning the package into the user's home directory:

git clone https://github.com/Powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k.git ~/

More installation options can be found here.

Next, add the following into your .zshrc file:

POWERLEVEL9K_MODE='nerdfont-complete'

source ~/powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k.zsh-theme

POWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(ssh dir vcs newline status)

POWERLEVEL9K_RIGHT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=()

POWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ADD_NEWLINE=true

Then, open your iTerm2 preferences, go to Profiles -> Text and then change the font settings. It is important to change the font to Hack Nerd Font. Otherwise, the icons will not display properly.

Style iTerm2 - color theme

There are tons of color themes that you can download.

Alternatively, if you want to use the same theme as me, you can download my theme configuration file zshColorTheme.json from my GitHub. Then, click Other Actions...and then Import JSON Profiles... in the window shown above, in order to import the configuration file.

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