Install zsh and oh-my-zsh on macOS Big Sur 11.5

Zsh is a UNIX command interpreter (shell) which includes enhancements of many types, notably in the command-line editor, options for customising its behaviour, filename globbing and more.

We’ll install zsh for all the features offered by oh-my-zsh: an open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.

Step 1: install zsh

Install zsh and zsh completions using homebrew:

brew install zsh

Step 2: install oh-my-zsh

Install oh-my-zsh on top of zsh to getting additional functionality, we can use curl:

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

or wget:

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

Step 3: configure oh-my-zsh

You can configure oh-my-zsh settings just by opening ~/.zshrc in a text editor. It should look like this:

# Path to your oh-my-zsh installation.
export ZSH=/Users/username/.oh-my-zsh

# Set name of the theme to load.
# Look in ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes/
# Optionally, if you set this to "random", it'll load a random theme each
# time that oh-my-zsh is loaded.
ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

# Uncomment the following line to use case-sensitive completion.
# CASE_SENSITIVE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to use hyphen-insensitive completion. Case
# sensitive completion must be off. _ and - will be interchangeable.
# HYPHEN_INSENSITIVE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to disable bi-weekly auto-update checks.
# DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to change how often to auto-update (in days).
# export UPDATE_ZSH_DAYS=13

# Uncomment the following line to disable colors in ls.
# DISABLE_LS_COLORS="true"

# Uncomment the following line to disable auto-setting terminal title.
# DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to enable command auto-correction.
# ENABLE_CORRECTION="true"

# Uncomment the following line to display red dots whilst waiting for completion.
# COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS="true"

# Uncomment the following line if you want to disable marking untracked files
# under VCS as dirty. This makes repository status check for large repositories
# much, much faster.
# DISABLE_UNTRACKED_FILES_DIRTY="true"

# Uncomment the following line if you want to change the command execution time
# stamp shown in the history command output.
# The optional three formats: "mm/dd/yyyy"|"dd.mm.yyyy"|"yyyy-mm-dd"
# HIST_STAMPS="mm/dd/yyyy"

# Would you like to use another custom folder than $ZSH/custom?
# ZSH_CUSTOM=/path/to/new-custom-folder

# Which plugins would you like to load? (plugins can be found in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/*)
# Custom plugins may be added to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(git)

# User configuration

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin"
# export MANPATH="/usr/local/man:$MANPATH"

source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh

# You may need to manually set your language environment
# export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

# Preferred editor for local and remote sessions
# if [[ -n $SSH_CONNECTION ]]; then
#   export EDITOR='vim'
# else
#   export EDITOR='mvim'
# fi

# Compilation flags
# export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

# ssh
# export SSH_KEY_PATH="~/.ssh/dsa_id"

# Set personal aliases, overriding those provided by oh-my-zsh libs,
# plugins, and themes. Aliases can be placed here, though oh-my-zsh
# users are encouraged to define aliases within the ZSH_CUSTOM folder.
# For a full list of active aliases, run `alias`.

alias zshconfig="sublime ~/.zshrc"
alias ohmyzsh="sublime ~/.oh-my-zsh"

Oh-my-zsh offers a lot of themes and plugins you can use to customize your shell experience. You can find everything on these links:

Themes: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/themes
Plugins: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/Plugins

Since I’m a full-stack developer and I’m working especially with Django and Node.js, this is how I have set my environment:

# Which plugins would you like to load? (plugins can be found in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/*)
# Custom plugins may be added to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(git git-extras git-flow colored-man colorize github vagrant virtualenv virtualenvwrapper pip python brew osx zsh-syntax-highlighting npm docker django bower celery node sublime sudo supervisor web-search)