Skip to main content

Better Git Started: An Introduction to the Command Line, GitHub, and Git

Ian Curtis

Section A.1 For Mac Users

Sorry, Windows users, this is only for MacOS users. If you are a Mac user, you will likely appreciate and benefit from these customizations.

Subsection A.1.1 A New Terminal: iTerm2

Instead of using the built-in terminal that comes with your computer, consider downloading a new terminal, iTerm2 55 . The default Mac terminal does great but if you are having trouble seeing what’s going on and want more colors or wish you didn’t have to type so much, then iTerm2 is for you.
This new terminal is free and has a multitude of nice features 56  such as
  1. split panes/tabs
  2. search
  3. fun colors
  4. autocomplete
  5. copy mode
  6. paste history
and many more. I personally don’t see any disadvantage to this terminal. Plus, it works with all the popular shells. To download, visit the link above and simply download it. Once it’s installed, it works immediately.

Subsection A.1.2 A New Shell: fish

Many computers rely on the bash shell to do most of their work. Mac computers now use zsh as their default shell. Shells have their own unique aspects and differences and frankly, it doesn’t really matter which shell you use unless you have a good technical reason to change. Shells are pretty advanced and I honestly don’t have much information to provide other than what a Google search can do since any shell will work for the content provided in this book.
That being said, I do recommend the shell fish 57 . This shell brings more nice colors, better autocomplete than iTerm2 (it will recommend as you type!) and, in my opinion, organizes the information on your terminal quite nicely.
Installing is not terrible. I assume you used Homebrew to install Git (Git in Materials: Mac). If you didn’t follow the instructions there to get Homebrew installed as it makes fish installation easy:
  1. type brew install fish into your terminal
  2. add the shell to your list of approved shells with sudo sh -c 'echo /opt/homebrew/bin/fish >> /etc/shells' (for newer Macs) OR sudo sh -c 'echo /usr/local/bin/fish >> /etc/shells' (for older Macs).
  3. change your shell to fish with chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/fish (new Macs) or chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish (older Macs)
After restarting your terminal, everything will be ready for use! For further customization of fish, type fish_config in the terminal which will open up a web interface.
If you don’t like fish, you can switch back to bash or zsh with chsh -s /bin/bash or chsh -s /bin/zsh.
PrevTopNext