iTerm Download and Customization
The terminal emulator, the needed fonts, the Zsh prompt
Last updated
The terminal emulator, the needed fonts, the Zsh prompt
Last updated
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:
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
Then add the following to your ~/.zshrc
file:
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