How To Glow Up Your Terminal Guide — Mac Edition

The article below is solely for entertainment purposes, follow at your own risk.

Warning: Time will be wasted.

A great way to spend a night of long lasting updates. Photo by me.

I am updating Xcode for what feels like the hundreth time this year. With the hours long break Xcode has in store for me, I decided to preoccupy myself with something enjoyable but equally as unnecessary: Terminal Beautification.

This guide is intended for the use of the following: a MacBook Pro/Air, an updated zsh and a good amount of time.

Step 0: Open the Terminal

Let’s start off by opening up the terminal. If you don’t already have this app shortcut readily accessible proceed with the following:

1. Press CMD + Spacebar simultaneously.
2. Input “Terminal” in the search bar and press Enter.

Step 1: Install Oh My Zsh

Although the standard white font on a black background is functional, introducing some color could offer visual relief. ‘Oh My Zsh’ is a robust, open-sourced framework suitable for this purpose.

Installation Methods:

1. Execute the following command in the Terminal:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

2. Alternatively, download it directly from the Oh My Zsh official website.

Post-installation, restart the Terminal to view your recent changes.

Step 2: Theme Selection

In case you like the default theme skip this step. Otherwise here is your first time-wasting activity of the day. Now that you have some color in your terminal it’s time to customize the default settings. A comprehensive collection of these themes are available in the Oh My Zsh GitHub Repository.

ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

For this guide, the chosen theme is ‘af-magic’. To implement your preferred theme:

1. Generate a Shell Resource file (.zshrc) using the command:

touch ~/.zshrc

2. Access the file with:

open ~/.zshrc

3. Locate the line ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell" and replace "robbyrussell" with your theme choice.

ZSH_THEME=”af-magic”

Once you’ve made your changes save the file (CMD + S), and close both the terminal and .zshrc file. Reboot your terminal to view your changes.

Step 3: Add a Heading

I did mention we would be wasting some time right? This is officially part two of the wasting-time activity series. Instead of starting your terminal in the empty, average, standard way, we are going to add a little magic to the beginning.

Now you have the freedom to get really creative. To generate structured headers, utilize the Text to ASCII Art Generator (TAAG) or search for ‘ASCII ART’ or ‘Figlet Generator’ for alternatives.

1. To embed your selected header, go back to your terminal and reopen the ‘.zshrc’ file we used earlier.

open ~/.zshrc

2. Find the line starting with echo and replace the content within the quotes with your chosen header.

Once again make sure you save the file (CMD + S), and close both the terminal and .zshrc file. Reboot your terminal to view final changes.

Woohoo, you finished!

My Xcode 12.1 still hasn’t finished updating, this is going to be a long night. I hope you all enjoyed this small terminal glow up guide and can use your terminal with more frequency and confidence. Wasting time never looked so pretty.

Almost there.