Saturday, April 7, 2012

Making your Terminal look pretty on a Mac

I got a 15-inch MacBook Pro (8GB RAM/256GB SSD) last week. Yippie!

My first requirement was to have my terminal look as snappy as my previous Linux one did. So, after a little googling, and checking out my Linux settings, I finally made my Terminal (iTerm) look pretty. Here are the steps:


  1. Open Terminal.
  2. Type the command "vim ~/.bash_profile". This will open the hidden file ".bash_profile" from your home directory. I am using vim to edit the file, but you could instead open the file in any editor of your choice. If this file does not exist, create it. We will be putting our configuration settings in this file, which will be read by iTerm Terminal whenever a new window is opened.
  3. Paste the following lines into this file: 

  4. # enables color in the terminal bash shell 
    export CLICOLOR=1 
    # sets up the color scheme for list
    export LSCOLORS=gxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad 
    # enables color for iTerm 
    export TERM=xterm-color 
    # Color Prompt 
    export PS1="\[\e[36;1m\]\u@\[\e[32;1m\]\w> \[\e[0m\]" 

    # sets up proper alias commands when called
    alias ls='ls -G'
    alias ll='ls -hl'

  5. Save you file and exit. 
  6. Close/Exit your Terminal, and open a new Terminal Window. 
  7. You should be seeing something as pretty as the screenshot below.




Note:
  1. If you would like to make more changes to how your prompt shows up. Read this link:
    http://www.funtoo.org/wiki/Prompt_Magic
  2. If you would like to change the LSCOLORS attribute, so that directories show up in some different color, then read this blog link:
    http://blog.imzaid.com/color-terminal-bash-on-the-mac-iterm-included

5 comments:

Gurpreet said...

Thanks Aven! Appreciate the kind words :)

Unknown said...

That sounds really difficult for me to do the program.
I just know how to convert Mp4 to Mp3 with some software.

Abhijeet said...

How could i join thoughtworks?

Gurpreet said...

See the side bar Abhijeet. You can email or directly apply.

Gurpreet said...

I switched over to using oh-my-zsh quite some time back. Its quite nice. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh