Beautiful command line

Once in a while, I watch videos on YouTube about how to program shell/ Python scripts or do other command-line Kung Fu. For quite a while, most of the videos share a common element related to the design of the videos, especially the look of the desktop. A clean and slick terminal on a clean and slick background. It is almost a Zen desktop with a terminal as the main application. Something I like and something I would like to have as well. This blog series showcases the path towards a clean and slick design which could look like this:

Well, at least sort of. While I was focusing on NeoVim in the first stage, the blog series turned into a blog series about command-line beauty in general. I started with the question of which terminal to use, which tools, which theme, and so forth and ended up, effectively months later, with the final NeoVim configuration. Although it took way more time than I expected and the scope increased significantly, I still think it’s worth taking you on the journey on how to get at least one kind of a beautiful command-line configuration. So, here we go …

The Desktop

I use macOS which is already out of the box quite clean. I tweaked a few things, but the only design-relevant change was a grey-coloured Zen-style background:

The idea is, that such type of background moves your focus to the terminal without creating a distraction from the workspace. This comes especially into play when using transparency within your terminal.

The Package Manager

Although you can install everything manually, I prefer to use a package manager to ease the application installation and lifecycle. As there are not many outstanding package managers under macOS, my package manager of choice is Homebrew. Homebrew comes with tons of applications and an easy command-line interface comparable to standard Linux package managers. The installation of Homebrew is done with the following command:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew update

The Font

One can’t say that macOS is shipped without a big set of fonts, but, the fonts focus on “normal” applications, like word processing or presentations. For terminal or coding applications, a different type of font is required with monospace, glyphs, ligatures and the like in mind. Fortunately, a big set of free open-source fonts is available for this purpose called Nerd Fonts. I use the 0xProto Nerd Font within my terminal and my coding applications:

brew install font-0xproto-nerd-font

In the next post I will describe the installation and theme of the terminal before I continue with the customizing of the terminal environment.

Hi folks! My name is

Thomas

Team-Lead Enterprise Applications, Linux expert, DJ & motorcycle enthusiast