Mm..Terminal

This post is about customising the look of Terminal on macOS. A number of nice themes are included with it (I enjoy Homebrew, among others), and can be selected in Preferences (cmd + comma).

I am a fan of Nova, the text editor. It offers four beautiful themes, which i wanted to make available for Terminal. Here they are: github link.

Extras

Colorized output for ls

Run alias ls to check if an alias already exists for ls. If it returns ls ='ls -G', you don’t need to continue.

If nothing is returned, you can change the default behaviour of the ls command by creating an alias for it: echo "alias ls='ls -G'" >> ~/.zshrc. From then on, ls will mean ls -G (the “-G” option means “enable colorized output”). Reload your terminal profile to updated the configured aliases: source ~/.zshrc.

For troubleshooting, see this stackexchange q&a.

Custom prompt

The prompt is the part that comes before the blinking cursor on the command line.

• do echo $PS1 to output current settings. Result could be: %n@%m %1~ %# , where:
  • %n stands for the current username
  • %m stands for the computer’s name, etc.
  • see (this page)[https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Prompt-Expansion.html#:%7E:text=The%20full%20machine%20hostname] for more on “prompt sequences”
• surround each element like %n with %F{1} on the left and %f on the right (you should replace 1 with a colour code from 0 to 15):
  • export PS1="%F{1}%n%f@%F{2}%m%f %F{3}%1~%f %F{4}%#%f "

Move the mouse pointer over the ANSI Colours pickers, to see colours 0 thru 15:

Other resources

• Oh My Zsh
• macOS Terminal Themes
• Base16