ITerm.app has come a long way since it was released more than a year ago. We have spent considerable amount of time adding features, fixing bugs, and making it faster and more robust. We believe we have a great relationship with the user community and respond quickly to their bug reports and feature requests. Download iTerm2 for Mac to improved terminal emulator. ITerm2 is a fork of the older iTerm project. ITerm2 is a Terminal replacement and the successor of iTerm.
I am spending a lot of time on the command line for the daily development work. I decided to install iTerm2 terminal as an alternative terminal for Mac OS because the default terminal app does not offer rich and powerful features to make my development life easier. So I decided to install advanced alternative terminal to replace Mac OS default terminal.
Before you install iTerm2, please refer its features on their website.
If you happy it’s features and power, you can download the iTerm2 from the following link. Alternatively, you can use Homebrew package manager to install this package.
Install iTerm2 terminal
After download iTerm2 installation file, simply drag and drop into the Applications folder to install iterm2 terminal app. Now you can launch iTerm, through the Launchpad for verifying the installation.
Alternatively, you can install iTerms2 via Homebrew package manager. Once you install the package using Homebrew, you will be able to launch iTerm2 via Mac Launchpad.
When you open iTerm2, it’s looks and feel not that pretty impressed by the first look. You need to follow few more steps to get the look you preferred. You can completely change its looks and feel by customizing default features.
Let’s just quickly change some preferences.
- ITerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.14 or newer. ITerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted.
- ITerm is an enhanced terminal emulator program for MacOS X written in Objective-C. It features VT100/ANSI/XTERM emulation, full i18n support, full-screen, multi-tab and other convenient GUI features. This project is indefinitely on hold, and we recommend that you try instead.
Remove computer name and username from the terminal’s bash prompt
Open iTerms2 “Preferences” configurations box. Then click on “Profiles” tab and select “General” tab.
iTerm2 -> Preferences ->Profiles -> General
Add following text under “Send text at start:” text input.
Close the “Preferences” box and reopen iTerm2 terminal and you will be able to see bash prompt without the computer name and username.
Change default colour theme and fonts
You can download more colour themes to install iterm2 terminal from this web site. http://iterm2colorschemes.com/
Download the zip file and unzip it for the preparation of the next step. Now open the “Preferences” settings window.
You can create a different profile other than Default if you wish to do so. I created a new profile for adding custom settings to the iTerm2.
Open iTerms2 “Preferences” configurations box. Then click on “Profiles” tab and select “Colours” tab.
iTerm2 -> Preferences ->Profiles -> Colours
Now click on “Colour Preset” drop-down and click on “Import” option. Navigate to the “schemes” folder previously unzipped colour profile folder. Then select your preferred colour themes and selected colour themes will be added to the “Colour Preset” drop-down after installing.
Now reopen iTerms terminal and see the effect of the new colour theme.
Once I customize iTerm2 colour theme still I did not see expected nicer interface. I decided to install Oh-My-Zsh to add more features.
Before install Oh-My-Zsh, you need to remove the previously modified text input in the iTerm2 preferences.
Because of Oh-My-Zsh, follow the different approach to remove the user@your_machine name from your bash prompt.
Oh-My-Zsh is an open source, the community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes,
Install Oh-My-Zsh
It’s a good idea to backup your existing ~/.zshrc file before installing Oh-My-Zsh.
Now you can use the following command on your terminal to install Oh-My-Zsh. You will be able to find more details on their website.
Now you almost have better terminal compared to default one. I decided to use “Agnoster” theme with the Oh-My-Zsh.
You can find many available themes for Oh-My-Zsh here. Before you enable “Agnoster” theme, you need to install Powerline fonts.
After installation completed edit ~/.zshrc and set ZSH_THEME=”agnoster”
Iterm2
After enabling “Agnoster” theme, you may be able to see broken fonts on the iTerm2, follow this GIT issue for fixing this fonts issue.
Users need to set both the Regular font and the Non-ASCII Font in “iTerm > Preferences > Profiles > Text” to use a patched font.
Now you may need to remove user@your_machine name from your bash prompt. Add following lines to your “.zshrc” configuration file and restart your iTerm2 terminal.
After you done all the above customizations, you can find your iTerm2terminall as following.
How to enable packages on Oh-My-Zsh
Oh-My-Zsh by default comes with lots of plugins to take advantage of. You can take a look in the plugins directory to see what’s currently available.
Once you spot a plugin (or several) that you’d like to use with Oh-My-Zsh, you’ll need to enable them in the .zshrc file.
I have enabled following plugins in my configuration file.
How to upgrade Oh-My-Zsh
Iterm Download Mac Os X
If you need to upgrade you just run following command on your terminal.
Mac Download Folder
How to uninstall iTerm2 terminal
Uninstalling Oh My Zsh
If you decided to uninstall iTerm2, first remove the Oh-My-Zsh theme. This will revert back your original zsh configurations.
If you want to uninstall oh-my-zsh, just run uninstall_oh_my_zsh from the command-line. It will remove itself and revert your previous bash or zsh configuration.
Uninstall iTerm2
If you install iTerm2 terminal vis Homebrew package manager, just type the following command on your terminal.
If you download installer file from directly from their website, you just need to trash it from “Application” folder.
Iterm Snippets
I hope you will enjoy the features of iTerm2 terminal and Oh-My-Zsh. Please comment your thoughts below.