protips
This site lists the protips that we shared with students during our courses
All instructions below are running in the terminal, open the application (by pressing command+space) and type iTerm (or if you prefer terminal) and follow the steps below.
1. Installing HomeBrew
HomeBrew is a package manager to help you install (mostly) CLI (command line interface) tools. Install it by running the following command in the terminal (copy/paste):
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
2. Installing ZSH (pronounced [Z shell]/[seashell])
Now that HomeBrew is installed, let’s take it for a spin by installing our first CLI tool. A tool to give you more options and better control over your terminal. Install ZSH by running this command in the terminal (copy/paste):
brew install zsh zsh-completions
In the above command we actually installed two applications; ZSH and ZSH-Completions, the second will help us type less by being able to use the tab-key instead to complete commands.
3. Installing Oh My ZSH
The terminal looks a bit dull by default, let’s bring in some color by installing Oh My ZSH. This is a package manager for ZSH which we just installed. As a package manager, it can give us even more options on how we easily can customize our new powerful terminal to provide us with even better support. Install it by running the following command in the terminal (copy/paste):
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
4. Open VS Code editor from CLI
In order to be able to easily open your code editor (VS Code) directly from the command line exactly where you are, we need to install that as well. This is installed from within VS Code by adding it to the path.
- Launch VS Code.
- Open the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P) and type ‘shell command’ to find the Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH.
- Restart the terminal for the new $PATH value to take effect. You’ll be able to type ‘code .’ in the terminal to open the current path in VS code.
5. Customizing (just for fun)
Try out even more what you can do with your terminal. Being good at using your terminal, not only looks cool, it also makes you more efficient rather than clicking around in a GUI (graphical user interface).
Read up more and see what else you can do to make it suit your style of use more by exploring the endless opportunities with dotfiles. Take a look at what is available for HomeBrew and Oh My ZSH, these are two go-to sources for lots of goodies.