My Linux Terminal

Hi everyone! For several days, I've been tweaking my terminal so that it could made me more productive and stylish. It is true that it was not that easy to tweak a terminal if one do not used to play with terminal. I, myself, indeed face some difficulties while installing all of this. Nevertheless, the result is very rewarding. So, I would like to share the steps to made a good terminal. This is the example image of my terminal. It made the default Ubuntu style for terminal lame.

This tutorial is built to work on Ubuntu. It should work with other linux distro with proper package installer. In order to made this terminal, we need 3 main tools.

1. ZSH, a powerful scripting language that designed for interactive use
2. oh-my-zsh, a zsh framework to manage ZSH configuration
3. Solarized, a cool color pallete for terminal

If you used to use bash as your default terminal, you will feel very convenient while using ZSH. The first step to customize your terminal is installing git. 

 sudo apt-get install git-core  

Git is essential because almost all the tools are hosted using git. Now, let us install ZSH. 

 sudo apt-get install zsh  

Then, proceed to install oh-my-zsh

 wget –no-check-certificate https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O – | sh  

Next, make ZSH as your default terminal.

 chsh -s /bin/zsh  

Easy. Now, restart your terminal and you'll have your terminal enhanced. ZSH have some features that would ease your development like auto completion of command, directory, and shortcuts. You can see it at here. The functional enhancement is done, now, let's tackle the style part. It is indeed stylish terminal makes me likes using terminal as it's color is very neat and compelling. :D. 

Fortunately, oh-my-zsh has abundant amount of built-in style. You can choose one from here. I use agnoster as my style. To pick your theme, edit the .zshrc file at your user home directory and sent the ZSH_THEME into the one you choose. :)

For the color pallet, there are a lot of color pallet on the web, but I choose Solarized. It is very neat and well designed. To use this, run this command. 

 git clone https://github.com/sigurdga/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized.git  

Remember that Ubuntu use gnome for it's desktop graphic. For, other linux distro, you need to use the other one like the KDE version. After that, put this line into .zshrc file.

 source <PATH_TO_gnome-terminal-colors-solarized>/set_dark.sh  

There are two types for solarized. It is light and dark. You can use set_light.sh for a bright style, but I prefer dark because it gives me more contrast color. The last step is to restart your terminal! Done! It should give you a cool new looking good terminal. :D. Let me know if you face some difficulties. I would be happy to help. :)