How to install “ohmyzsh”

Beautiful and yet simple terminal life

Aaron Cleveland
3 min readMay 11, 2020

Have you ever watched a YouTube video from someone and they open up a beautiful terminal window. The first thing that pops into your mind is WOAH that looks amazing! In this article I am going to over how to get that all setup with just the default theme they have provided.

Let’s get started, open up your terminal on your Mac. We have a few options we can do.

  • Local Terminal
  • iTerm2
  • Or other local shell program that you use on your Mac.

Your local terminal which can be found by pressing the following keys "command + space" on your keyboard and search for terminal.

My personal favorite which is iTerm2. Once downloaded and installed just drag to your dock and your all set! When you open up your terminal of your choosing. You should be greeted with the bash shell. This should be your terminal screen if you have not previously changed or it’s a fresh macOS install!

To setup “ohmyzsh” we are gonna take a stroll to their website and grab the download link.

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

Once you have that copied, let’s head over to our terminal and paste it in and press enter.

It will ask you if you "Do you want to change your default shell to zsh? [Y/n]" you want to type the letter Y on your computer keyboard, and then ask for your computers password.

Remember when typing in your password for your computer in terminal, it will not display what you are typing. If you did everything correctly your terminal should tell you it was successfully changed the shell over.

If at anytime you would like to uninstall this shell run the following command in your terminal.

uninstall_oh_my_zsh

Your terminal would need to be restarted. Once restarted you might see that your shell says it’s in "zsh" that is okay. Your macOS comes with it installed, run this command to get back to bash terminal

chsh -s /bin/bash

or to go back to zsh.

chsh -s /bin/zsh

Although this is a really simple install. Changing your terminal can be very daunting. I hope this article was able to cover your needs.

Thanks for reading!💥

--

--

Aaron Cleveland

iOS Developer @HomeDepot | Father | Inspiring Game Developer