Improving the terminal

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • zsh

    Mirror of the Z shell source code repository.

  • The shell is the interface we interact with when we open a terminal session. The default shell for most Linux distributions and macOS was the good old bash for decades, but some competitors have gained prominence in recent years. The most relevant is zsh, now the default for macOS and many Linux distros. I used zsh for a while, but discovered fish in a tweet by Carlos Becker, tried it, and didn't come back back. fish is lighter and faster than zsh (empirical fact, it's my impression as I haven't done or read benchmarks) and comes with lots of features built-in utilities like faster auto-complete, wildcards for browsing directories, between many other.

  • starship

    ☄🌌️ The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

  • As I commented at the beginning of this post, the shell is the interface with which we interact with the operating system. And interfaces should be user-friendly and beautiful. One way to achieve this is by using a tool that allows customizations, and the tip I want to leave here is Starship. It is an application made in Rust, and we can use it in any shell to allow customizations of the prompt. The prompt is the input where we type the commands to be executed by the operational system. Installation and configuration are straightforward, as seen on the project's page. Once installed, configure the ~/.config/starship.toml file. For example, the configuration:

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  • fish-shell

    The user-friendly command line shell.

  • The shell is the interface we interact with when we open a terminal session. The default shell for most Linux distributions and macOS was the good old bash for decades, but some competitors have gained prominence in recent years. The most relevant is zsh, now the default for macOS and many Linux distros. I used zsh for a while, but discovered fish in a tweet by Carlos Becker, tried it, and didn't come back back. fish is lighter and faster than zsh (empirical fact, it's my impression as I haven't done or read benchmarks) and comes with lots of features built-in utilities like faster auto-complete, wildcards for browsing directories, between many other.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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