Installing and customizing terminal with #zshrc theme #zsh

I am going to share about a small customization that I did to my zshrc theme. 

Oh My ZSH homepage

Introduction

What is zshrc? What is zsh? what is z shell? What is a shell? 

Shell

In short, a shell is a command line interpreter that interprets the command you type on your terminal (on a Macbook)

Taken from Wiki Unix Shell:

A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a traditional Unix-like command line user interface. Users direct the operation of the computer by entering commands as text for a command line interpreter to execute, or by creating text scripts of one or more such commands.

Check out this StackOverflow post for explanation of the difference between a 'terminal', a 'shell', a 'tty' and a 'console'.

Taken from the above post:

In unix terminology, the short answer is that

terminal = tty = text input/output environment

console = physical terminal

shell = command line interpreter

Z Shell (zsh)

In short, Z Shell is a shell that focuses on interactive use.

Taken from Z Shell homepage

Zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language. More information can be found on the "Zsh Web Pages" sites.

Taken from Wiki Z Shell

The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of Bash, ksh, and tcsh.

ZSHRC

Taken from zshrc homepage

Oh-My-Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes

ZSHRC Installation

Prerequisites 

Unix-like operating system (macOS or Linux)

Zsh should be installed (v4.3.9 or more recent). If not pre-installed (zsh --version to confirm), check the following instruction here: Installing ZSH

curl or wget should be installed

git should be installed

curl

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

wget

sh -c "$(wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh -O -)"

Check out more information about zshrc on zshrc GitHub repo.

ZSHRC Theme Customization

Using a theme

First of all, there are many themes have already been developed. There are at least a few hundreds themes out there. You will probably find one that you like by browsing through the list: themes come with the repo and more themes that you can install.

For those themes that come with the repo, you just have to open up your ~/.zshrc file and change robbyrussell to the name of the theme that you like  

ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

zshrc set theme ZSH_THEME

Customizing a theme

My terminal looks like this now with sushi as the prefix.

Terminal with zshrc

I got my idea by referring to mainly these 3 themes:
i) emojiparty.zsh-theme
ii) random-emoji.zsh-theme
iii) oh-my-zsh-random-emoji.zsh-theme

This is what I added to my ~/.zshrc and changed my terminal profiles to get the above effect.

PROMPT="🍣 "

RPROMPT='%{$fg[yellow]%}%c$(git_prompt_info) %t'

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_PREFIX=": "

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_SUFFIX=""

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[yellow]%}*"

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_CLEAN="%{$fg[yellow]%}"

Terminal preferences - profiles

Variables

PROMPT - define the prompt line from left hand side

RPROMPT - define the prompt line from right hand side

git_prompt_info - print git branch from git plugin

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_PREFIX - define the prompt line before git_prompt_info

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_SUFFIX - define the prompt line after git_prompt_info

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY - define the text colour of git prompt when there is uncommitted change

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_CLEAN - define the text colour of git prompt

%{$fg[yellow]%} - set text colour

%t - print out time 

Check out zsh prompting document to learn about prompts

Function

You can also write call a function within your zshrc to further customize your shell.

EMOJI=(🐷 🐼 🐶)

function random_emoji {

  echo -n "$EMOJI[$RANDOM % $#EMOJI+1]"

} 

Thank you for reading!

Jun