Oh My Zsh!

The terminal is fun. And it should also look fun (and be functional). I’ve been using Robby Russell’s Oh My Zsh for years now, but it still surprises me when people haven’t heard of it.

I’m not going to go into a ton of detail as to why you should use it. Here are a few great posts that already do that.

Nope, I’m mostly going to talk about how I have been adding a series of increasingly ridiculous emojis to my prompt. Why? Because if I am having a bad day, dammit if a 💩 doesn’t make me smile a bit. Right now I have a rainbow if I have a clean git repo, but I’m going to add a unicorn as soon as I can update my work computer.

There are so many awesome, fun themes to use depending on your workflow. I was using a slightly modified bullet-train:

But then today, I decided it was taking up too much space and went back to an old standby: crunch. I modified it just a bit to change the icons (💩) and also to just display the current folder instead of the whole path. Though I’m sure the whole path can be useful to most people, my directory paths can sometimes get long and ridiculous, so generally a folder name does in a pinch. If I need to confirm, there’s always pwd.

Try zsh. It has some other sweet features that are all useful, but my favorite thing is the themes and how much easier they make my day to day.