Good day all!
First I’d like to thank all the people who replied to my first post and provided so much valuable information! Since then I’ve been trying to force myself to get comfortable with using the terminal! To this end I’ve been running Sway as my Desktop Environment and printed out a cheat sheet to place next to my screen.
Now, a paragraph deep, for the question(s):
How do y’all customize your terminals? I’m not looking for tutorials, just your preferences. How long did it take for you to settle on your favourite? What did you prioritize when customizing? What customization are you fondest of?
Thanks in advance to any and all replies, hope to hear from you all soon!
I put a dozen aliases in bash_aliases and call it a day. If I find myself in the terminal I don’t want to be hamstrung with some unique configs that nobody can help me with and I can’t remember making.
This feels TOO reasonable, I love it.
What’s the most common aliases you use?
I use Fish as my shell. It’s got some really nice convenience features, without needing customization, which I find useful. If I’m working in a VM or some server for a bit longer, I’ll often just install the fish package and have my normal level of (good) usability.
Downside is that Fish uses somewhat different syntax than Bash, so I can’t just copy-paste more complex commands into there. But yeah, then you’ll see me run bash, then the complex command in there, and then I’ll exit back out of there.
For the shell prompt, I’m using Starship with a bit of a custom theme, based on their Gruvbox Rainbow preset:
So, what it shows there is:
- the exit-code, if it’s non-zero
- the duration how the long the command took, if it’s longer than a few seconds
- the timestamp when that command finished
- the path where I’m in
- the Git branch and whether I’ve got changes that are uncommitted, stashed etc., if I’m in a directory with Git repo
- the toolchain in the repo that I’m in
I also use light theme in the terminal. Sue me. 🙃
I set up a couple profiles with different colored backgrounds so that I can easily visually distinguish terminal windows when I have several open at once. For example, I usually switch the profile to one with a red background when I ssh into a server to help avoid confusion about which system I’m running commands on. I also cranked up the font size a bit in all profiles to make it easier for me to read.
I mostly learned from some of the terminal customization which came stock with Manjaro when I was first learning Linux. So when I made the jump to Arch, I customized my terminal with fsh with the powerlevel10k theme and text highlighting. I also modified some of the default text colors to a green color to evoke green phosphor CRT terminals.
I don’t have a lot of customization, just a few tweaks to make things a little more pleasing to me.
I’m a bash guy, and I like the Dracula theme, I currently use gnome and gnome terminal with Dracula, but soon plan to try out Hyprland and Sway.
My command prompt customization is also minimal,
Outside of those visuals, the biggest customization is that I use zoxide for directory navigation instead of cd (I have the command aliased to zd).
edit: spelling
Thanks for the reply!
Zoxide seems cool, typing long paths has been an annoyance of mine so far but I think I’ll keep writing them out for the “experience”.
