Lets make that ugly terminal look better! 🐚

(I am Doing this on a Raspberrypi, but this can be done on Any Linux Distro, MacOS or Windows Subsystem for Linux if you are on windows)

Before:

After:

If you have watched any other tutorials/posts like this, you know, that we use a package called ohmyzsh, but that slows down the shell a bit, so we will do it without ohmyzsh! Just normal zsh! (We will use a theme called powerlevel10k)

Step 1: Install zsh

Now, most of Linux distributions come Pre Installed with bash, which is a shell, but we will use zsh in this tutorial

So to install zsh on Ubuntu/Debian/Raspbian/Mint/Pop/Any debian based distro run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install zsh

Next run zsh on the command line to test if the installation worked If it did, you are ready for the next step 🎊 else troubleshoot the install 😕

Step 2: Changing the default shell

Open up a new terminal and Bash will popup... Let us make zsh the default 😎

To Change the default shell, run:

chsh

and when prompted, enter /bin/zsh as the shell

Now, open a new session, and boom there is zsh... still ugly though

Step 3: Style it up 🤩

Let us now install our theme powerlevel10k

First you can install a recomended font... mostly a nerd font (Link to repo below) I use a font called VictorMono NF (also linked below)

Run:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k.git ~/powerlevel10k
echo 'source ~/powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k.zsh-theme' >>~/.zshrc

This installs powerlevel10k, When you open up a new session, you get a config wizard:

Answer the question to your liking and then use your new better terminal!

And we did not use Ohmyzsh

So how did you do it? Do share your new shell look in the comments below!

Also 👍 this post if you found this helpful

My video on using it with oh-my-zsh

Links in this post 🌐

My ~/.p10k.zsh file copy paste if you want the same thing 😄

Powerlevel10k repo

Nerd Fonts Repo

Victor Mono NF