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Fish shell and customization

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A quick peek at the shell interface.

This weekend I spent some time tweaking the Terminal on my Mac with iTerm2 and Fish shell. Why did I do it? First of all, I have been quite fed up with the boring black-and-white look of the default Terminal app. In my opinion, the introduction of multiple colors together with glyphs/icons not only makes it look better visually, it also helps one distinguish different contents (e.g. directories, files) more easily. Moreover, I just want more customizations and features like autosuggestions to make working with command lines a little more efficient. So below are the ingredients I used to customize my Terminal and instructions for some key steps.

Ingredients #

  • iTerm2: A popular terminal emulator for macOS
    • Colors: I personally use Solarized Dark
      • Download Solarized
      • Unzip and double click on the the color scheme Solarized Dark.itermcolors under the directory /iterm2-colors-solarized
      • Open iTerm2’s Preferences → Profiles → Colors, and select the theme under Color Presets
    • Text: We need one of the Nerd Fonts to render the glyphs/icons; I chose two of them
      • Meslo Nerd Font: Downloaded from the Tide repo; this particular font contains all the glyphs needed
      • Source Code Pro Nerd Font: Installed on Homebrew via brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts (only need to run this once) and then brew install --cask font-source-code-pro; This is the font I’d like to use in text
      • Alternatively, all the Powerline Fonts can be installed based on this repo
      • Go to iTerm2’s Preferences → Profiles → Text, under Font, choose Source Code Pro (for Powerline) or any font you like; select Use a different font for non-ASCII text, then choose MesloLGS NF under Non-ASCII Font
    • I also resize the New Windows to be 120 columns and 40 rows under the Window panel
  • Fish shell: A great alternative to bash and zsh
    • Installation: brew install fish
    • Set fish as the default shell:
      • Add the shell to /etc/shells with echo /usr/local/bin/fish | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
      • Change the default shell with chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
    • Oh My Fish: Package manager for customizing the fish shell
      • Check all the themes contained in Oh My Fish: omf theme
      • I installed the Agnoster theme: omf install agnoster
      • Apply the theme: omf theme agnoster
    • Fisher: Plugin manager for fish
      • See all the plugins and prompts here
  • Exa: Replacement for ls
    • Installation: brew install exa
    • Customized ll and lla:
      • Find fish config file (config.fish) in ~/.config/fish
      • Add the following lines to the config file (I got this trick from the great Takuya Matsuyama):
        if type -q exa
	alias ll "exa -l -g --icons"
	alias lla "ll -a"
end

OK, there you go! Enjoy the fresh new look!

Update 1 #

While setting up fish on a M1 Mac yesterday, I realized that the fish shell path is not the same as in Intel-based Macs. So if you have a Mac with Apple Silicon, after brew install fish you can run:

  • fish_add_path /opt/homebrew/bin
  • echo "/opt/homebrew/bin/fish" | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
  • chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/fish
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