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The Fish shell goes where few command-line shells have gone before, shedding its forebearers’ POSIX baggage in favor of simplicity, consistency, and ease-of-use. Much like the Mac creators thought computers should be made to understand how humans work (and not the other way around), Fish observes your past behavior and suggests commands that. FISH, the friendly interactive shell, is a Unix shell that attempts to be more interactive and user-friendly. Let's start by installing the FISH shell and a few add-ons like theme manager, oh-my.
Get the shell layout you deserve

If you're an active Mac user that spends a good amount of time using shell, you may have noticed that the OSX Shell by default is bear bone and not very productive to use on a daily bases.

The question is, how we can make OSX shell more productive?

Getting Started

Install/Deploy iTerm2

iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm that brings multiple new features and optimizations that can make users more efficient.

We can iTerm2 download from the official Web Site.

iTerm2 provides features, including Split Panes, Search, Autocomplete, Split Panes, Instant Replay, etc. You can read more on their official Documentation Page.

You may also like: Implement a Command-Line Shell by Using Command Dispatcher in Python.

Install Xcode

Just running below command in the iTer2 will install Xcode.


Deploy Homebrew

Homebrew is the most used package manager for Apple macOS

Installation is a straight forward process. Simply run the following command in iTerm2.


Once we have Homebrew installed, we can update it.


OSX by default comes with Python 2.7 installed, so we're going to update to the latest version of Python using brew. Then, we're going to deploy the newest version of git and vim and install neovim as a potential replacement for vim. In addition, we will install a few more useful packages that come into the light later


As for Python, we can use pip to install to add any other packages/modules we may need.


Now, let's make our shell shine.

Add the following lines to your ~/.bash_profile that will execute ~/.bashrc during the terminal launch. Download microsoft access free mac.


We can now make our bash prompt more colorful and useful by adding bash_completion. In the ~/.bashrc file, add the following code.


Now, we can configure the rest of bash (e.g. history aliases some color for man pages and nice color output for less and cat commands).

Add below lines to your ~/.bashrc file


Example for ~/.vimrc:

~/.vimrc

Let's enhance our command history; instead of cycling with up and down arrow keys through the entire history of the commands, you can type a command and cycle only for the latest history of the SYNOPSIS Ex. ls-a, ls -la, ls -la / ls -la /etc. Once you type ls, you can navigate through past commands you used.

Create a file in the home directory .inputrc and add the following entries


Add below entry to ~/.bashrc to import settings from ~/.inputrc.


If you are a git user and use git CLI from the shell, it is nice to know what branch you are in without typing git branch.

Download both files from following links into your home directory ~/.


Then add the following lines into ~/.bashrc.


Master branch

Another useful tool to keep in mind is tmux.

Tmux is a terminal multiplexer for Unix-like operating systems. It allows multiple terminal sessions to be accessed simultaneously in a single window. It is useful for running more than one command line program at the same time. It can also be used to detach processes from their controlling terminals, allowing SSH sessions to remain active without being visible.

Install tmux.


Installing tmux

Below is the configuration file used to configure tmux~/.tmux.conf.


We change activition key binding for tmux from default Ctrl+b to Ctrl+a similar to screen.

Fish Shell For Mac

Now that we configure nice-looking bash shell and terminal and learn how to take advantage of the added options we can move to a more advanced terminal and maybe even try to replace bash with more modern-looking shell FISH.

FISH, the friendly interactive shell, is a Unix shell that attempts to be more interactive and user-friendly.

Let's start by installing the FISH shell and a few add-ons like theme manager, oh-my-fish, that can male our FISH fly.


In the above example, we install FISH and oh-my-fish and deployed 'bobthefish' as a theme.

To make the FISH look even better, let's install powerline and fonts.


To make the FISH shell default when you start terminal usechshwhere you can replace bash with theFISH path

Do not forget to change fonts for iTerm2 to add newly installed fonts.

In Preferences./Profile/Text

Text preferences

You can add an additional configuration option for oh my FISH by editing and adding below lines to ~/.config/fish/config.fish.


Fish Shell For Mac Catalina

For tmux to start with FISH, you can add below two lines to the beginning of the ~/.tmux.conf.

Fish shell for mac computers


To add aliases you can add to ~/.config/fish/functions/.

Examples you can find at https://github.com/mudrii/.files/tree/master/HWD_Mac/.config/fish/functions.

Your terminal should look much better with FISH and tmux.

Improved terminal view/layout

We are not done yet; let's make vim look nice with our shell theme and functionality.

The first step is to install vim-plug, as the vim plugin manager, where can manage, install, and uninstall all needed plugins for vim.


Edit your ~/.vimrc config file for vim and add the following lines.


Open vim and run PlugInstall. This will install all plugins defined in ~/.vimrc.

Adding plugins for vim

The rest of ~/.vimrc (with some neat configuration options) can be found here.

With a few more useful apps, you can make use of are ranger as a file-manager in the shell terminal, bat as a replacement for cat, htop console process viewer manager, fdas areplacement for find, and p7zp advance archiver.


Download music on mac. All configuration files used in this article you can find here.


Further Reading

bash,fish,osx,vim editor,vim,tmux,tutorial
Published at DZone with permission of Ion Mudreac. See the original article here.
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