If you’re anything like me you are super particular about your terminal setup. I am capable of working in most terminal environments, but since I spend a lot more time using the setup on my personal computer than those on machines I SSH into, I figure it’s worth spoiling myself in that context, despite the fact that it might incur a slight efficiency penalty when I’m using machines without all the niceties that I like to add. Since I am now in the process of setting up my development environment once again, I figured I would take this opportunity to document all the things I do in a post so I don’t have to go through so much trial and error every time to remember how I like things.
Terminal
First things first, don’t even open Terminal. Get iTerm.
Package Manager
The next thing you’ll need is a package manager. I’ve tried Homebrew, but I found it to be confusing as someone who’s spent time with other package managers like apt and pacman. I’ve also run into issues when macOS updates are installed; sometimes the permissions of your /usr/local directory get reset, and consequently your whole environment gets screwed up. The latter experience left me with a sour taste in my mouth and a compulsive desire to Dockerize everything, so now I’m using MacPorts. I found this post to be a well thought out comparison between the two, if you’re interested something more nuanced than my knee-jerk reaction.
Docker
Not strictly a terminal thing, but something that’s important to my environment, due to the aforementioned compulsive Dockerization habit. I just install the Docker For Mac app, not sure if that’s the best way to do it but it’s worked well for me so far.
Shell
Once you’ve got iTerm and MacPorts setup, time to install your shell of choice (unless it’s bash, which is fine I guess). Personally I’ve always been partial to zsh, mostly because it’s what all my friends used in college (a nuanced decision making process, I know). Recently I’ve been considering checking out fish, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. To install zsh, just run:
$ sudo port install zsh zsh-completions
A necessary companion to zsh in my mind is Prezto, which adds a ton of nice features like history substring search, mostly reasonable git aliases, and vim bindings for your prompt, among other things. It’s recommended that you fork the repo so you can store your personal configuration in GitHub. My fork is here; it’s pretty basic, just turning on a few colorization settings, adding some extra aliases, and tweaking my favorite prompt theme to have emoji (the most important change obviously).
I’ve typically used a modified version of the steeef prompt that comes with Prezto, but with this install I also discovered starship, which seems interesting. I’m unsure how much feature overlap it has with Prezto, so whether I continue using it or not remains yet to be seen.
Text Editor
As far as I’m concerned Vim is the One True Text Editor, and I mostly refuse to use any application that doesn’t have a Vim bindings plugin. However, having gone way down the rabbit hole of Vim tweaking in the past, I will say that overall I prefer to use NeoVim since it tends to be easier to get plugins to work well with NeoVim without recompiling with a bunch of different variant flags. Install it with
sudo port install neovim
and add
alias vim='nvim'
to your .zshrc for an easy transition. Two bindings I find important are:
nnoremap j gj
nnoremap k gk
which allow you to move up and down wrapped lines (helpful for writing blog posts and whatnot without needing to add line breaks manually).
Font
I really enjoy Hermit.
Colorscheme
I like the Apprentice color scheme for both Vim and iTerm. Do note that the background color for iTerm in that repo is a little off from that in the Vim one, change it to #262626 to avoid having a frame around your Vim window. For installing it to Vim, I use vim-plug.
Conclusion
I think that’s about everything… This will likely be a living document that I will modify as my preferences change.
