iTerm Download and Customization

The terminal emulator, the needed fonts, the Zsh prompt

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