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Python, Terminal, And Related Topics
  • Introduction and Motivation
  • Terminal How-To's
    • Running Python and Shell scripts in Terminal, and passing arguments
    • Delete Many Folders At Once in Python
    • iTerm Download and Customization
    • Environments & Installing a Python Package in Editable Mode
    • Git Useful Commands, and Tricks
    • Special Dot Files
  • Python Snippets
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  1. Terminal How-To's

iTerm Download and Customization

The terminal emulator, the needed fonts, the Zsh prompt

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Last updated 1 year ago

The things you need to download are: a terminal emulator, color schemes for your terminal emulator, nerd fonts, shell prompt tool

You can download iTerm from or choose your own terminal emulator

Now we need to download one of the Nerd Fonts, which will allow the ligatures to print out paths and environments when we download and activate a shell prompt tool, like Spaceship (in a following step). Download your favorite nerd font from here , I chose hack nerd. Preferably, download it with Homebrew, which saves you the trouble of manually moving all font files to the font directory in Mac to make them available for your iTerm. Find the instructions at the end of the link. For downloading Hack Nerd Font, you'll only need to run two lines:

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts &&
brew install --cask font-hack-nerd-font

Download the color schemes from , then you'll find them under "~/.../mbadolato-iTerm2-Color-Schemes-5ebab3b/schemes" folder. Now you add them from iTerm Preferences -> Profile -> Colors -> Color Presets dropdown menu -> Import... -> load the "schemes" directory referenced above.

To make the most out of iTerm, customize functionality and appearance, we need a shell prompt tool, like Spaceship If you find the installation instructions confusing, here's what worked for me

cd ~/Documents/github_repos/
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/spaceship-prompt/spaceship-prompt.git

Then add the following to your ~/.zshrc file:

source ~/Documents/github_repos/spaceship-prompt/spaceship.zsh

Before adding to the ~/.zshrc file, you can run the source command above in the terminal and see how it feels.

☞ Anything not added to environment variables, to zshrc, or zprofile is not permanent in a session.

There are many other terminal shell prompts out there, PowerLevel10K, Pure, Starship... see blogs like or

https://iterm2.com/index.html
https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads
https://iterm2colorschemes.com
https://spaceship-prompt.sh/getting-started/
https://computingforgeeks.com/best-terminal-shell-prompts-for-zsh-bash-fish/
https://www.slant.co/options/19487/alternatives/~spaceship-alternatives