Guide To A Beautiful And Powerful Terminal With OhMyZsh and Powerlevel10k
Recently, I learned how to configure the look of the zsh terminal on macOS and was stunned with how many options there are. Since the Powerlevel10k theme is my favorite so far, I will show you how to set it up so you can brag about your new terminal to your peers.
This guide is intended for macOS with zsh as default terminal. However, there are alternatives for Bash and Powershell that work similarly.
Install OhMyZsh
First, we are going to install OhMyZsh which is a framework for handling your zsh configuration.
1
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
Running the above command backs up your current .zshrc file and creates a new one based on the OhMyZsh template. It also downloads all plugins, themes, and some other files and puts them into the /Users/{username}/.oh-my-zsh directory.
There are also over 300 plugins and 150 themes that you can activate. For example, the git plugin is activated by default and includes several shortcuts for git commands which can make your life as a developer a bit easier once you get to know them. This is just a side note, though, as the main part of this guide are the themes. A complete list of all plugins and themes can be found here and here, respectively.
Set Up Fonts
When you restart the terminal after installing OhMyZsh, the robbyrussel theme will be used.
However, you might notice that the icons are not shown correctly. This is a font issue and can be solved by installing the following ttf files as mentioned by powerlevel10k’s instructions:
After installing them, you need to configure your terminal to use these fonts by going to Terminal → Preferences → Profiles → Text, click Change under Font and select MesloLGS NF family.
Install & Configure Powerlevel10k
Let’s get to installing the Powerlevel10k theme now. This is the theme you can see in picture at the beginning of this post. It can be found on romkatv’s GitHub page.
Since we have already installed OhMyZsh, we can use the following command to clone the repositories into OhMyZsh’s theme folder:
1
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/themes/powerlevel10k
After it has finished downloading, set the ZSH_THEME in your new ~/.zshrc file to powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k and restart your shell.
After restarting, a configuration wizard should open automatically. If it doesn’t, type p10k configure to trigger it manually. Choose the options that suit you most.
Enjoy your new shiny shell!
If you don’t care about OhMyZsh’s plugins and only want the Powerlevel10k theme, you can also install it via a different method. You can find all installation methods here.
Configure VS Code
If you use VS Code, you may realize that fonts don’t work correctly on their built-in terminal. In order to solve that, do the following:1
- Press
Command + Shift + Pin VSC to open - Type
settings.json - Select
Preferences: Open Settings (JSON) - Add
"terminal.integrated.fontFamily": "MesloLGS NF"to the JSON root - Save and restart VSC