ifishy-term

Power up the plain o'boring terminal in MacOS with iTerm and fish shell.

Table of contents 📖

• Preview 👀
• Tools 🔨
• Installation
  • iTerm2
  • Homebrew
  • fish shell
  • Fisher
  • Powerline fonts
• Configurations 📝
  • config.fish
  • Themes
  • fish_config
• Extras ✨
  • iTerm2 toggle shortcut
  • iTerm2 transparency
  • iTerm2 split panes
• Troubleshooting 🛠
  • Brew not found
  • Weird symbols after using themes
• Credits 💰

Preview 👀

Tools 🔨

We are going to use these powerful tools to make our terminal on steroid!

• iTerm2 - a new terminal to replace the boring default terminal.
• Homebrew - package manager to install missing stuffs for our shell.
• fish shell - a smart and user-friendly command line shell.
• Fisher - power up fish with plugins with this plugin manager.
• Powerline fonts - THEMES!! But before that we need some fonts.

Installation 💻

Now we will go through step-by-step the required installations.

Remember, we're only installing the tools needed, configurations will come after this

iTerm2 (Optional)

We strongly recommend installing iTerm2 to replace the default terminal.
Click here to download and install.
Following steps we will be using iTerm2 as our default terminal.

Homebrew

Install Homebrew by using the command below and follow the instructions:

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

Quick check after the installation is done.

# Apple Silicon
which brew
/opt/homebrew/bin/brew

# macOS Intel
which brew
/usr/local/bin/brew

If everything goes well, using brew shouldn't require any sudo brew, refer to this documentation if something went wrong.

fish shell

Next stop is the mighty fish shell, run the commands below to install and setup as default shell:

# install the latest fish
brew install fish
# add fish path to /etc/shells
echo $(which fish) | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
# make fish as your default shell
chsh -s $(which fish)

Nice! Now we have iTerm2 powered up with fish!

Fisher

Once we have fish installed, it's time for some plugins to make our life easier.
Install Fisher, the plugin manager for fish:

curl -sL https://git.io/fisher | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher

After it's done, let's get started with some useful plugins.

# update all plugins
fisher update
# autocompletion for most used directories
fisher install jethrokuan/z
# for better bash compatibility
fisher install edc/bass
# printf with colours
fisher install Markcial/cprintf
# docker completion
fisher install barnybug/docker-fish-completion
# fuzzing finder
brew install fzf; fisher install jethrokuan/fzf
# colourizer for terminal apps
brew install grc; fisher install oh-my-fish/plugin-grc

If brew install <plugin> is not working, make sure that which brew is printing the correct executable path, more info in the troubleshooting section

Powerline fonts (Optional)

At last, fonts installation is optional, feel free to skip this step if not planning to setup any themes (but WHY NOT?!).

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/powerline/fonts/master/install.sh)"

Open the Font Book app to verify that the fonts are installed.

Configurations 📝

🎉 Congratulations! We have done all the required installations, now it's time for some configurations.

These are just some recommendations, feel free to mix and match to your own needs.

config.fish

fish shell configurations is located in ~/.config/fish/config.fish
This is equivalent to ~/.zprofile or ~/.bash_profile but it's for fish.

If the file does not exist
touch ~/.config/fish/config.fish

# add the lines below in the config.fish file
source ~/.fish_aliases
source ~/.fish_variables

Here we will source these two files everytime when fish shell logins.
By doing so, now we can have access to the configurations directly on the user folder level.
These are the recommended contents for both files.

# ~/.fish_aliases
# command aliases to be used daily
# directories
alias l "ls -alF"
alias .. "cd .."
# git
alias gst "git status"
alias gco "git checkout"
alias gcl "git clone"
alias gc "git commit"
alias gps "git push"
alias gpl "git pull"
alias gb "git branch"
alias gl "git log"
alias gad "git add"
alias grm "git rm"
alias grst-h "git reset --hard HEAD"
alias gprune "git branch -vv | grep ': gone]' | grep -v '\*' | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs git branch -D"
# others
alias v "vim"
alias npml "npm list --depth=0"
alias gr grunt
alias ns "npm start"
alias py3 python3

# ~/.fish_variables
# set the shell variables in a fish way
# https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/set.html
# node version using `n` package
set -x N_PREFIX $HOME/.local
set -x PATH $N_PREFIX/bin:$PATH
# default JAVA_HOME with specific Java version
set -x JAVA_HOME (/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8.0)
# Docker default platform arch for Apple Silicon
set -x DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM linux/amd64

NOTE: remember to run source ~/.config/fish/config.fish after changing these configurations.

Themes

There are lots of themes available for fish shell, check out this list to choose one most suitable for yourself.
We'll choose bobthefish in this case for its clean sleek git-aware feature.

First we need to install oh-my-fish, another package manager but this time for fish themes.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish/master/bin/install | fish

Run this to install the theme.

omf install bobthefish

There might be some weird symbols appearing on the terminal, don't worry we will fix it here.

fish_config

Run the command below:

fish_config

It will open a new browser page, here we can

• set the color scheme and prompt
• view all functions and variables
• view shell history
• full documentation here

Remember to ^C to end the config session when you're done.

Extras ✨

This section is also optional

iTerm2 toggle shortcut

Ever been into situations like you just want to switch between the terminal and your editor/browser, and using ⌘Tab is too slow and prone to tabbing in a wrong window?
We've got you covered here, introducing iTerm2 toggle shortcut!
Just go to iTerm2 > Preferences > Keys > Hotkey

• ☑️ Show/hide all windows with a system-wide hotkey - check this option.
• Hotkey: your preferred keys combination - recommend to use ⬆Space since it's not used by default in MacOS.

With the new shortcut keys, you can toggle the terminal anytime anywhere!

Not really anywhere, if you are using multiple Desktop spaces, it will automatically switch to the space that the terminal was opened.
To prevent this, here's a tips to use the terminal in any active space that you are currently working on.

1. Open the context menu for iTerm2 in the Dock.
2. Go to Options.
3. In the Assign To section, make sure to check All Desktops option.

iTerm2 transparency

Able to toggle terminal anywhere is great, but it's also important for us to keep track of what we are working in the background.
We can change the window transparency of the terminal to stay aware of the stuffs that we are working with.
Also we can set blur for the transparency to keep some privacy of the background.
Go to iTerm2 > Preferences > Profiles > Window

• Adjust the Transparency value, 0 is not tranparent (opaque), 100 is full transparent.
• Check the Blur option if you want to have some privacy on the background, the larger the value the blurer it became.
• Check the Use transparency option so that every new terminal window will follow the same settings.

iTerm2 split panes

Having multiple shells in a single view is very useful, we can achieve that by using split panes.

• ⌘D - To split vertically (left/right)
• ⬆⌘D - To split horizontally (top/bottom)

To differentiate which pane that is currently active, we could use the dimming option.
Go to iTerm2 > Preferences > Appearance > Dimming

• Set the dimming amount to a comfortable level.
• ☑️ Dim inactive split panes - check this option.

Troubleshooting 🛠

brew not found

Most commonly happened after the session has been restarted, this is due to the brew executable path is not sourced correctly when the shell logins. Run this command to patch it:

eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" >> ~/.zprofile

If prefer using .bash_profile

eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" >> ~/.bash_profile

Then restart the terminal session and try again.

Weird symbols after using themes

When you set a new theme, you might see some weird symbols like this if your font is not set correctly.
Here's how we fix it, in your iTerm2 > Preferences > Profiles > Text > Font, select any Powerline font that we have installed previously.

Credits 💰

Original tutorial: fish-shell-setup-osx by ellerbrock