Since upgrading to Yosemite I wanted to refresh my terminal’s look. It makes sense spending time customising it considering how much time I spend looking at it.

When working on my laptop it is even more apparent as I tend to run in full-screen/distraction mode (

cmd + return

in iTerm).

Colour Scheme

I really love the Base16 color schemes - you can’t really go wrong with any of them. For the moment I am using Chalk light which is a great subtle colour scheme that is easy on the eyes. All of these are conviently avaialble for iTerm2 here.

##Prompt

The prompt character comes at the beginning of each new line in the terminal. To find the perfect prompt character I trawled through all of the unicode characters. I didn’t realise how many cool ones there are. Here are some of the ones I considered:

☢ ☣ ☠ ⚠ ☤ ⚕ ⚚ † ☯ ⚖ ☭ ⚒ ⚛ ⚜ ☥ ✧ ⋆ ★ ☆ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯ ✰  ☫ ☬ ☸ ✵ ❂ ☘ ♡ ♥ ❤ ⚘ ❀ ❃ ❁ ✼ ☀ ✌ ♫ ♪ ☃ ❄ ❅ ❆ ☂ ❦ ✈ ♕ ♛ ♖ ♜ ☁ ☾ ✔

I finally settled on these ⚔ swords. It is definitely not the most logical choice. I imagine the a greater than symbol (>) is probably the most obvious but this is my prompt!

My pirate style prompt

swash

is available here

Installation

• Copy into

.zprezto/modules/prompt/functions

• E.g.

ln -s /Users/scratch/prompt_swash_setup /Users/dunc/.zprezto/modules/prompt/functions

• Update Prezto .zpreztorc file

• E.g.

zstyle ‘:prezto:module:prompt’ theme ‘swash’

Settings

If you are customising your terminal I would highly recommend either creating your own dotfile repo or syncing with Dropbox. I have lost my settings a number of times and it would be very annoying trying to re-create it all from scratch.

If you want to see my complete iTerm2 preferences they are available here To load them follow these steps:

• General -> Preferences (load preferences from custom folder)