Jazz Up Your “ZSH” Terminal In Seven Steps — A Visual Guide

In this blog I’ll cover installing ITerm2, ZSH shell, “oh my ZSH”, Themes, ITerm2 color schemes, “oh my ZSH” plugins and enable “ligature” support to help create a beautiful and powerful Terminal.

If you want to just make your regular Bash Terminal powerful, take a look at my previous blog: “Jazz Up Your Bash Terminal”. But ZSH explained in this blog is more powerful stuff.

Summary:

We’ll be covering a lot of things. This may be confusing, so here is the summary of what we will be doing.

1. Install ITerm2 — This is a better alternative to the default Terminal
2. Install latest ZSH shell — This is more powerful than the regular bash shell. We will switch ITerm2 to use ZSH shell.
3. Install “Oh My ZSH “— This is a CLI tool to easily configure ZSH and add themes and plugins to ZSH
4. Add two types of Themes using “Oh My ZSH” — some themes need extra steps so we will cover both
5. Install different ITerm2 Schemes — These are just color schemes for the UI
6. Add two different Plugins using “Oh My ZSH” to improve productivity
7. Enable “ligature” support so when you write an arrow =>, it appears like a real arrow →