Prettier OSX terminal with iTerm2 and Prezto
I wanted to describe my current Mac OS X shell setup. I’ve switched from the default Terminal.app to iTerm2. This includes the following:
- switched from bash to zsh
- use prezto framework for a prettier colorful prompt
- set up a few iTerm2 triggers e.g. to capture and highlight or show Android gradle build errors etc.
I’ll list every step I took to install all the various pieces:
1. preparation
First install Homebrew if you don’t have it yet:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
And we also need caskroom to install apps with binary installers:
$ brew install askroom/cask/brew-cask
2. install zsh
$ brew install zsh
3. install iTerm2
$ brew cask install iterm2
4. configure zsh as the new default shell
Just for interest’s sake, this is to show that originally I was on bash:
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
$ echo $BASH_VERSION
3.2.57(1)-release
Now change my default shell to zsh:
$ chsh -s /bin/zsh
Re-open iterm2 and check the shell version again to confirm zsh is running:
% echo $SHELL
/bin/zsh
% echo $ZSH_VERSION
5.0.5
Specify custom location for my dot-files so I can save them in a git repository at BitBucket:
% mkdir ~/dotfiles
% cat <<EOT > ~/dotfiles/.zshenv
#!/bin/zsh
export ZDOTDIR=~/dotfiles
source "\${ZDOTDIR}/.zprofile"
EOT
% touch ~/dotfiles/.zshrc # will put my fav aliases and functions here
% ln -s ~/dotfiles/.zshenv ~/.zshenv
Quick example of some handy aliases etc in .zshrc:
% export ZDOTDIR=~/dotfiles
% cat <<EOT >> ~/dotfiles/.zshrc
source "\${ZDOTDIR:-\$HOME}/.zprezto/init.zsh"
export JAVA_HOME="`/usr/libexec/java_home -v '1.7*'`"
alias ll='ls -FGlAhp'
alias gca='git commit -a --amend'
alias gr='./gradlew'
# etc...
EOT
5. get prezto
% git clone --recursive https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto.git "${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zprezto"
Symlink some default prezto config files:
% setopt EXTENDED_GLOB
for rcfile in "${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}"/.zprezto/runcoms/^README.md(.N); do
ln -s "$rcfile" "${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.${rcfile:t}"
done
Re-open the iterm2 window to see if all the dotfiles are set up correctly (i.e. zprezto modules are loading without errors).
Set the theme (I use steeef built-in theme), modules (like git) etc in .zpreztorc:
% vi $ZDOTDIR/.zpreztorc
For example, to change the theme in .zpreztorc from the default, look for the following line and change sorin to steeef:
zstyle ':prezto:module:prompt' theme 'sorin' # <-- change 'sorin' to 'steeef'...
After setting up vi key bindings, ^R for history substring search stopped working. View the current key bindings - this confirms ^R is currently bound to redisplay instead of history-incremental-search-backward:
% bindkey -L | grep '\^R'
bindkey "^R" redisplay
I added this line to my ~/dotfiles/.zshrc file to enable ^R history search again:
bindkey "^R" history-incremental-search-backward