Iterm2-theme-for-mac Walled
I recently started a, and got a shiny new Macbook Pro to go with it. Having spent most of my personal and professional life on Windows, I knew that an adjustment period would have to follow.
Below are my impressions, the good, bad, and the ugly side of adjusting to One Cupertino Way after a lifetime on Windows. One of my biggest concerns before the big switch were actually keyboard-related. I’m a Windows Power User™ (don’t laugh!), and do most of the things with keyboard shortcuts.
I have my favorite Windows and bound to specific shortcuts, which I use every day. I would have to re-learn many shortcuts, which I consider to be the worst part of the whole experience. I made it a special effort not to remap any of the default Mac keys, so I could learn to use any Mac (of which there are plenty here). Before embarking on my new adventure, I had for survival tips, and am very thankful to everyone who contributed! Here are the tips in no particular order, which made my initial experience much more “familiar”: Brew (short for Homebrew) is like for Mac! Brew is a package manager which lets you install things from the command line. A more correct comparison would be: brew cask is to Mac what choco is to Windows: is an extension of Brew that lets you install applications, while plain brew is for installing from source.
Shell Speaking of command line, I knew from before that Macs have a vastly superior shell experience, but I had to enable it first, by installing a few things:, a terminal replacement for OS X, and using zsh instead of Bash, by way of setup. Not having any specific preference, that’s what I’ve done, and I’ve very happy for it! Specific tips: Solarized Dark theme for iTerm2, and theme for Oh My Zsh, and a patched font to go with it, if you don’t see the status icons. In addition, I have installed via brew, (which was the inspiration for my favorite PowerShell tool ), and enabled it in Oh my Zsh using the autojump plugin (edit /.zshrc to add it to the plugins entry, e.g.:) plugins=(git zsh-autosuggestions autojump) Productivity Right off the bat, I was advised to buy a productivity tool for the Mac, which combines a launcher with a powerful search. I ended up buying it within the first 20 minutes because of the Clipboard History feature (which is a paid “Powerpack” addon). On Windows, I cannot live without my beloved clipboard manager, and Alfred offered a great alternative. Buying Alfred opens up additional possibilities via Workflows, which I’ll mention later.
Keyboard I love my ergonomic Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard, and I refuse to type on anything else (which includes the keyboard on the Mac itself). Between the choice of the very thin and very painful-looking Apple Keyboard and Magic Mouse and a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard (with a Sculpt Ergonomic mouse), choosing my setup was a no-brainer. The problem, of course, is that Mac uses a different keyboard layout than Windows, specifically it has the ⌘ (Command/Cmd) key, which is used for most things Ctrl is used in Windows. To overcome this mismatch (and remain consistent with the default keyboard layout on the Mac), I used an excellent util called, which is a keyboard remapping on steroids.
On the Mac, the rightmost control keys are: Control, Option and Command. To match the Mac layout, I mapped the Windows key to Option, and Alt to Command using the following Karabiner settings file.
Left ALT to COMMANDL and vice versa private.leftalttocommandl KeyToKey KeyCode::OPTIONL, KeyCode::COMMANDL KeyToKey KeyCode::COMMANDL, KeyCode::OPTIONL. And some other tweaks.
For the full listing, see. To import it, go to Karabiner preferences, to the Misc & Uninstall tab, then in the Custom Settings press Open private.xml, and save the XML in that file. Finally, go to the Change Key tab and select the new custom settings you want to enable.
Update: looks like this is also possible to do without Karabiner, by adjusting the Modifier Keys in the Keyboard settings. In addition, this lets you select the specific keyboard you want to adjust (instead of having two separate profiles for Karabiner). Big thanks to Michael Martz for his! Screenshots There are a few ways to on a Mac, most involve pressing several keys together. I found a nicer way to do this using an, which allows quickly launchig the screen capture tool from Alfred: Misc Other things I found useful/annoying when working on a Mac:. Installing Applications is the #1 difference between Windows and Mac - other than Brew mentioned earlier, the “standard” way to install applications on a Mac is simply dragging its icon to the Applications folder in Finder (Mac’s “Explorer”).
To remove the application, drag it to the trash can! Applications on the Mac are self-contained, no installers/uninstallers required. Minimizing does not work the same as Windows: if you minimize the active window, it will shrink itself with a “Genie effect” next to the trash can, and won’t be restored with Command+Tab! (equivalent of Alt+Tab on Windows). To make tabbing work like Windows, Hide ( Command+H) the active windows instead. Command+Q quits the application. (thanks to for the tips!).
Iterm2 Install Mac
Selecting text behaves differently on a Mac: pressing Command+Left/Right jumps to the beginning/end of the line (holding Shift will select the text). To jump to the next/previous word, use Option+Left/Right instead (note: this doesn’t seem to work in iTerm2 by default, it has to be.). Other shortcut keys which are different between Windows and Mac, in no particular order:. In Chrome, selecting the the address bar is Command+L and not Command+D (muscle memory for Alt+D on Windows).
Switching between languages is Command+Space. It’s not possible to bind language switching to Command+Shift (like Alt+Shift on Windows) The shortcuts found in all menus are represented by symbols, which can sometimes be annoying to remember (e.g. ⌘ for the Command Key, ⌥ for the Option Key).
I have installed - a small keystroke visualization utility to help me remember which is which. I’m sure I forgot a bunch of things, but the hardest thing to adjust to, I found, is the Command/Ctrl switch: things like copy and paste on a Mac are Command+C/Command+V, which require a thumb press on the Command, which is very uncomfortable at first (think pressing Alt+C instead of Ctrl+C on Windows.) Overall, I’m happy with the experience. Things work a bit differently here, but it’s not all bad. Most importantly, I finally have the working on my Mac!
I am spending a lot of time on the command line for the daily development work. I decided to install 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.
$ brew cask install iterm2 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. Iterm2 Default Colour Theme Let’s just quickly change some preferences. 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 Iterm2 Preferences Remove Computer and User Name Add following text under “Send text at start:” text input. Export PS1 = ' w $ '; clear; Close the “Preferences” box and reopen iTerm2 terminal and you will be able to see bash prompt without the computer name and username. Iterm2 Bash Prompt Without Computer Name and User Name Change default colour theme and fonts You can download more colour themes to install iterm2 terminal from this web site. 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.
Iterm2 Profile
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. Iterm2 Terminal With Custom Colour Theme Once I customize iTerm2 colour theme still I did not see expected nicer interface. I decided to install to add more features. Before install Oh-My-Zsh, you need to remove the previously modified text input in the iTerm2 preferences. Sh - c '$(curl -fsSL Install Oh-My-Zsh on iterm2 Now you almost have better terminal compared to default one.
I decided to use “” theme with the Oh-My-Zsh. You can find many available themes for Oh-My-Zsh.
Before you enable “Agnoster” theme, you need to install fonts. After installation completed edit /.zshrc and set ZSHTHEME=”agnoster” After enabling “Agnoster” theme, you may be able to see broken fonts on the iTerm2, follow this 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@yourmachine name from your bash prompt. Add following lines to your “.zshrc” configuration file and restart your iTerm2 terminal.
Upgradeohmyzsh Upgrade Oh-My-Zsh 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 uninstallohmyzsh 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.