When you’re using Linux, the majority of the user time you spend in a terminal. An attractive terminal allows us to improve personal productivity and enjoy the process of work. If you’d like to customize your terminal and make it look professional, we’ll show you how you can use Oh My Zsh to achieve this goal. In this article, we’ll describe how to install and configure a beautiful terminal for your Ubuntu Linux.
Oh My Zsh
Oh my Zsh is a community-driven open-source framework that you can use for managing the Zsh configuration. Take a look at Which terminal is better: Bash vs Zsh to learn more about Zsh.
Zsh has a lot more useful functions, themes, helpers, plugins, and other features that will help you get more out of your shell.
Currently Oh My Zsh is capable of supporting 150 themes and 275 plugins.
Now, let’s head towards the process of customizing Oh My Zsh on Ubuntu.
Oh My Zsh installation
In this section we’ll cover the Oh My Zsh installation process.
Before making any changes in my system I’d prefer to test them first. The ideal option is to use Ubuntu Docker image. The primary reason here is an ability to reset the container if something goes wrong.
To launch Docker container use the following commands:
docker run -it ubuntu:20.04 /bin/bashDefault Ubuntu Docker image does not contain Zsh, you, you have to install it first:
apt-get update
apt-get install -y zshNow, you can launch Zsh terminal:
zsh --version
zsh
Starting from now, all commands will be the same for Ubuntu Docker container and your Ubuntu system.
First, we need to make sure, that we have required packages on our system which include git, curl, and wget:
apt-get update && apt install -y curl wget gitNext, install the latest version of Oh My Zsh framework:
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
Answer Y to switch your default shell to Zsh.
Setting up Oh My Zsh theme
In addition to all other features of Oh My Zsh, I especially enjoy the themes collection that comes with the installation.
It enhances the terminal appearance and increases productivity.
By default, all Zsh themes installed to ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes directory:
ls ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes
The default theme for the Zsh shell is “robbyrussell“.
To modify this theme, update the ~/.zshrc file and set ZSH_THEME variable value with the name of the theme you want to use:
nano ~/.zshrcTry to use crunch, for example:
Now, use the following command to install powerline fonts:
| apt-get install -y powerline fonts-powerline |
To apply theme changes, execute the following command:
source ~/.zshrcSetting up Oh My Zsh plugins
Oh My Zsh supports a large number of plugins and it is easy to set them up. If you’d like to start using any plugin, you need to download the plugin kit and add its name to the plugins variable in ~/.zshrc file.
The default installation of Zsh comes with a git plugin which allows you to get information about branch, commits and status of your local git repository.
As an example, let’s add two additional useful plugins:
To install first plugin, just clone it to the Zsh plugins directory:
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
Same thing should be done for the second plugin:
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting
Now, add the names of downloaded plugins in the plugin parameter of ~/.zhsrc file:
nano ~/.zshrcModify the plugins variable:
To apply the changes, use source command:
source ~/.zshrcSetting up Oh My Zsh updates
Every two weeks Oh My Zsh automatically checks up for the updates.
You can also disable this function by setting the DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE variable to true.
Or you can change the update interval time by changing the value of UPDATE_ZSH_DAYS.
For manual update, use the following command:
omz update
To enable syntax highlighting, add it to ~/.zshrc:
echo "source $HOME/.zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc
Finally, apply the changes:
source ~/.zshrcSummary
In this article, we covered the basics of customizing your Zsh shell in Ubuntu Linux using Oh My Zsh. We showed how to set up Zsh themes, install additional powerline fonts, enable syntax highlighting, install plugins, and do automatic and manual Oh My Zsh updates.
We hope you’ve found this article useful. If so, please, help us to spread it to the world!
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I’m a passionate Cloud Infrastructure Architect with more than 15 years of experience in IT.
Any of my posts represent my personal experience and opinion about the topic.
