Up until not too long ago I barely used the terminal, I used it when absolutely necessary but whenever it was possible I immediately switch to a GUI for whatever I was doing. After reading yet another “Why Vim is awesome” blog I decided to make the switch from Textmate to Vim. And once I was editing in Vim I noticed that I was more productive by just fullscreening my terminal and staying in the terminal as much as possible. Without continuously switching between my mouse and keyboard I got faster and faster at the stuff I do most of my day: coding and everything related to it. Since then I’ve been trying to optimize my work flow as much as possible.

The first step to having a pleasant terminal environment is getting the proper shell. I’ve picked oh-my-zsh. Not because I think zsh is way better then bash or the few other alternatives, because I honestly wouldn’t know whether it’s actually better. But because oh-my-zsh is crazy simple to install and configure, and instantly gives you awesome benefits. One of the biggest is the auto completion, especially when just getting started in terminal it’s great when you vaguely remember a command that you can just press tab and it’ll suggest a bunch of commands for you to use. Another great one is the theming options that come with oh-my-zsh. The starting theme is awesome on itself, but whenever you have some spare time you should really try customizing a theme to your own desire.

Installing Obviously they’ve got installing instructions on their github page, however if you’re a mac user installing oh-my-zsh is just a simple oneliner:

curl -L https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh | sh

Have fun!