I decided to dedicate my first review in 2019 to an app that I’ve been using for a long time now. iTerm2. The superb macOS terminal app.
Find iTerm2 software downloads at CNET Download.com, the most comprehensive source for safe, trusted, and spyware-free downloads on the Web. Since we're going to be spending a lot of time in the command-line, let's install a better terminal than the default one. Download and install iTerm2. In Finder, drag and drop the iTerm Application file into the Applications folder. You can now launch iTerm, through the Launchpad for instance. Let's just quickly change some preferences. Downloads; What is iTerm2? ITerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.12 or newer. ITerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted. Why Do I Want It? Check out the impressive features and screenshots. If you spend a lot of time in a terminal, then.
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The first time I started using a terminal app was back in the days when News47ell was hosted by DigitalOcean. I used to SSH into my server when I needed to manage the backend of my site.
Now, I use the terminal to build and manage News47ell on GitHub.
If you are someone who just started using Terminal.app, I recommend that you switch to iTerm2. And if you’re someone who’s looking for the best terminal app for macOS, congratulations, you’ve found it.
Even if you have no idea why you are here and you clicked on this link by mistake and kept reading all the way until here, first, Thank you and second, this app is for you.
In all seriousness, iTerm2 is great. It packs a lot of features that are missing from Terminal.app that allow you to customize the app and make it truly yours.
So let’s take a closer look at it
Hotkey Window #
Have you ever played Counter-Strike and you wanted to enter a cheat code? You press the ~ button and a console menu appear from the top. Well, you can do the same thing with iTerm2.
The Hotkey Window feature allows you to register a hotkey that will bring iTerm2 to the foreground so you can quickly use it even if you’re inside another app.
Split Panes #
This feature allows you to work and keep an eye on multiple things at the same time.
For example: When I work on this site, I have 3 panes opened at the same time.
Instant Replay #
Well, this should be obvious. iTerm2 allow you to have an instant replay of everything that you did inside the terminal window. A line you edited, a code you executed, a file you opened, everything is recorded and you can watch a replay of it instantly.
Inline Images #
I had no idea about this one until I started writing the review. You can view images and GIFS inside iTerm2.
It uses two shell scripts, imgcat to display full resolution images and imgls to list all images.
Profiles #
I have 3 profiles set up and I switch between them depending on what work am doing inside the terminal.
The first profile is the default one which I use for full-screen writing when I want to write a new article using vim.
The second profile is tmux.
Last profile is a dropdown profile which I talked about in the Hotkey Window feature section.
Customization #
There are many options to choose from and to make iTerm2 YOUR terminal.
Like the option to enable/disable GPU rendering, dimming of inactive windows, borderless windows, colors and fonts, and a ton of experimental features.
Development #
Although both Terminal.app and iTerm2 are still in development and both receive updates, with Terminal.app, you have to wait until a new version of macOS to get new features while with iTerm2, anytime the developer pushes a new update, you receive it right away.
I don’t like waiting a year to receive an app update. That’s why I like to stay away from all the apps that are made by Apple.
Conclustion #
You really should use iTerm2. There’s no other way of putting it.
The app has much more features than the ones I mentioned like tmux Integration Mouseless Copy, Autocomplete and Shell Integration. There’s a big community out there that uses the app on a daily basis. It’s free, but you can always donate to the developer George Nachman.
Many if not most traditional SharePoint developers are new to the dev stack and build tool chain Microsoft selected for SharePoint Framework development. This style of development leverages popular open source tools built on Node.js and developers more time in the terminal/console than they are used to. In spending time with and talking to developers making this jump, I’m finding they are interested in some of the tools and things I use. I am working on a series of posts that aren’t specific to the SharePoint Framework but are tangentially related to the development experience. This is one of those posts.
In my last post I explained why I like using NVM to not only facilitate but manage multiple Node.js installations. In this week’s post I want to share how I set up my terminal on my laptop. I get this question a lot when sharing screenshots or doing a presentation and wanted a resource to point people to. This will be that post.
This post will show you how to configure your command prompt to look like this:
There are a few key points about this prompt:
The end of this post includes a form where you can download a script & the resources needed to make your prompt look like this.
I want to tip my hat to Thorsten Hans and his post on this topic that got me started down this path. This post includes some of what I learned from his post as well as my own tweaks.
Oh, before I go too far if you’re a Windows person, this isn’t for you. The closest configurable command prompt I would recommend is Cmder for Windows.
MacOS includes a default command prompt… that is Terminal. Terminal is the interface to the bash command promptIt is very basic just like you’d expect as an OS included tool. For me (and most people), it’s too basic.
A popular alternative to bash is to use Oh My Zsh, a community-driven framework for managing the config of the popular ZSH prompt on UNIX. iTerm is the MacOS Terminal replacement, also community backed, that is very configurable. I use both of these. After getting these setup, I then apply a custom theme and add a few customizations to make my prompt just perfect.
Installing Oh My ZSH & iTerm
The first step is to get Oh My ZSH and iTerm installed. This is easy… especially if you are using Homebrew.
If you aren’t using Homebrew, consider adopting it. Homebrew is a way to manage your MacOS installs using scripts and the command line. I use it to script my MacOS install to about 90%, installing & configuring a few other apps that aren’t supported in Homebrew.
First, install ZSH and ZSH completions using Homebrew:
brew install zsh zsh-completions
Second, install Oh My Zsh on top of ZSH:
Iterm For Windowscurl -L https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh | sh
Finally, install iTerm2. Using Homebrew, you install it using cask (an addon for Homebrew) so first install cask, then iTerm2:
https://high-powertable.weebly.com/blog/hp-printer-drivers-for-windows-8.
brew install cask
Adobe digital reader mac download.
brew cask install iterm2
Install Fonts
A special font, Powerline, is used to implement the arrows and git branch icons. I also use the Source Code Pro font for some stuff… you can get those from the download folder at the end of this post.
Place these fonts in the
~/Library/Fonts . The Powerline font Meslo LG M DZ Regular for Powerline.otf will be in the root of the ~/Library/Fonts folder & the Source Code Pro font is in a subfolder:
Configure iTerm
The next step is to configure iTerm’s settings.
First you need to import a few color profiles. Open the settings for iTerm, go to the Profiles (#1), select the Colors tab (#2), then in the Color Presets. selector (#3), select Import (#4):
Select all three color profiles I have provided in the download at the end of this post when importing:
After importing the colors, set iTerm to use the Powerline font that you installed. Within the iTerm settings, select Profiles (#1), select the Text tab (#2) and set the font to Powerline (#3):
Add Oh My Zsh Customized Theme “Bullet Train”
Now that you have your command prompt setup with ZSH, Oh My Zsh and customized iTerm to use the correct font & colors, the last step is to import a new theme for Oh My Zsh.
Copy the file
bullet-train.zsh-theme to ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes . Feel free to inspect this theme. I won’t get into the details of how custom themes work in this post with Oh My Zsh… if you are interested, head over to their wiki to learn more.
Once the theme has been copied in, you need to configure ZSH to use the them. Open your
~/.zshrc file and locate the ZSH_THEME https://ameblo.jp/rortkabmeme1979/entry-12631068308.html. line. Set the name of the theme to Bullet Train: ZSH_THEME=bullet-train .
Save your changes and restart iTerm. Tada!
Don’t sweat the error you see about node not being found. I demonstrated this using a clean MacOS install so it doesn’t have Node or NVM installed yet, hence why no version is shown in the green section and I’m getting an error message about missing Node.
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I’ve created a screencast showing the process I outlined above using a brand new MacOS install.
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