Beautify Your Mac Terminal with iTerm2, Zsh, and Starship

Introduction

Do you spend a lot of time in the terminal and want to make it more visually appealing and productive? In this blog post, I’ll show you how to beautify your Mac terminal using iTerm2, Zsh, and Starship. Whether you’re a developer, sysadmin, or just love tinkering with your setup, this guide is for you.

Introduction to iTerm2

iTerm2 is a powerful terminal emulator for macOS that offers a lot of features and customizations. Let’s start by downloading and installing it.

Downloading and Installing iTerm2

1. Download iTerm2: Head over to the iTerm2 website and download the latest version.
2. Install iTerm2: Once downloaded, open the .dmg file and drag iTerm2 to your Applications folder.

Setting up Nerd Fonts

Nerd Fonts provide icons and glyphs for your terminal applications. Download and Install Nerd Fonts:

1. Visit the Nerd Fonts website and choose/search a font such as “FiraMono Nerd Font“.
2. Download the font file (usually a .zip archive).
3. Unzip the downloaded file and select all the .ttf font file(s) and double click to “open“
4. Font window will open and click “Install” to install it on your system.

Basic iTerm2 Configuration

• Open iTerm2 and Preferences: Open iTerm2 and go to Preferences (Cmd + ,).
• Customize Appearance: In the Profiles tab, Select “Colors” and you can customize the appearance, colors, and fonts. Choose a theme that you like. I recommend using the Smoooooth color scheme for a modern look.

• Set Font: Go to the Text tab and choose a font like ‘FiraMono Nerd Font Propo’ for better compatibility with icons and symbols and increase the size of font if required.

• Set Natural Editing: Go to Keys tab and choose ‘Natural Text Editing’ and click ‘Remove’ to confirm and load preset. This helps to switch between words using cmd keys

Configuring Zsh

Zsh, or Z shell, is a powerful shell that offers many improvements over the default Bash shell, including themes and plugins. On modern macOS versions, Zsh is already the default shell, so we can skip the installation step.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

brew install zsh

chsh -s $(which zsh)

Oh My Zsh is a framework for managing your Zsh configuration.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Adding Plugins for Zsh

To further enhance your terminal, let’s add some useful plugins for Zsh.

Installing Plugins

We’ll add the zsh-syntax-highlighting and zsh-autosuggestions plugins for syntax highlighting and command autosuggestions.

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

Configuring Plugins

Next, enable these plugins in your .zshrc file.

1. Open the .zshrc file in a text editor.
2. Find the plugins array and add zsh-syntax-highlighting and zsh-autosuggestions
3. Save the file and restart your terminal or run source ~/.zshrc.

plugins=(git zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-autosuggestions)

Adding Starship Prompt

Starship is a cross-shell prompt that is fast, customizable, and minimalistic. Let’s add it to our Zsh setup.

Installing Starship

You can install Starship using Homebrew.

brew install starship

Configuring Starship

Next, configure Starship by adding it to your .zshrc file.

1. Open the .zshrc file in a text editor.
2. Add the following line at the end of the file: eval "$(starship init zsh)"
3. Save the file and restart your terminal or run source ~/.zshrc.

Using a Starship Template

To make things easier, we’ll use a pre-configured Starship template. Let’s set it up.

mkdir -p ~/.config && starship preset gruvbox-rainbow -o ~/.config/starship.toml

This will download a gruvbox-rainbow template configuration file for Starship to your system. You can edit this file to customize the prompt to your liking or you can find more presets here.

Bonus

If you’re using VS Code Editor & Terminal then make sure you update the Font settings on VS code.

• Open VS Code and go to Settings (Cmd + , )
• Search font family and set FiraMono Nerd Font Propo for both
  • Editor: Font Family and
  • Terminal › Integrated: Font Family

Wrap-up

That’s it! We’ve successfully transformed our Mac terminal into a beautiful and productive environment using iTerm2, Zsh, and Starship. I hope you found this tutorial helpful.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions for future tutorials.

Please check out my YouTube channel Sundar Skills for video guide, demo and some bonus contents.

Thank you for reading!