Table of Contents

1. Tilix
2. Oh-my-Zsh
3. Conclusion

Tilix

Tilix is my default terminal emulator today. It's very easily customized, allows tiling, has various keyboard shortcuts, and generates a beautiful interface.

Installation

You are able to install Tilix by running:

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install tilix

Oh-my-Zsh

As for Oh-my-Zsh installation, you will need zsh pre-installed. If you do not have zsh installed, you can do so by running:

sudo apt install zsh

Installation

If you do, you are able to install Oh-my-Zsh one of three ways:

Install via curl:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Install via wget:

sh -c "$(wget https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh -O -)"

Install via fetch:

sh -c "$(fetch -o - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Choosing a theme

All the themes are located in the GitHub here in alphabetically order. At the bottom of the list, there is another link for external themes, which leads you here. Don't spend too much time picking the perfect theme the first time since you can always change it.

The theme in the photo above is called agnoster and for that theme, you need the Powerline fonts. Hint: a lot of the themes require these fonts.

Installing the Theme

To install these fonts, you will clone the repo into /tmp:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git
cd fonts/
./install.sh

Then you're able to change your theme to the one you want by opening ~/.zshrc in your editor of choice. For this example, I'll use agnoster:

ZSH_THEME="agnoster"

For themes that require the use of the Powerline fonts, you will need to change the font in Preferences as well.

Changing Colors (optional)

If you aren't 100% happy with the selected theme, but you like the formatting. You can try to change the colors around a bit.

This GitHub issue explains that Oh-my-Zsh uses spectrum for its colors. This can be found in ~/.oh-my-zsh/lib/spectrum.zsh.

It also explains that one has to be sure they are using a 256-color terminal mode. For Ubuntu, you would usually run export TERM="xterm-256color" to enable 256-color support.

This GitHub issue, which was solved by the user who opened the issue himself, explains how spectrum_ls will display all 256 colors.

Conclusion

Going from a completely black and white terminal emulator to a tiling, customizable terminal emulator, I could not be any happier with my day-to-day application. I definitely will go back and make some tweaks when I have the time but, then again, don't we all say that just to get lost in another project?

Let me know which is your favorite terminal and settings in the comments below. I'd love to hear what everyone's using. Maybe it'll give me some more ideas for mine.

Happy coding!