If you are a developer, coder, sysadmin or IT Pro I assume that you have used the terminal either on your Unix, Linux, Mac o Windows. And the shell that usually comes as default is the good old faithful BASH shell, which is nice but not cool.

What is Oh-My-Zsh?

Oh-My-Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a other cool things.

Below are some facts about it:

• More than 200 plugins. Enhance your productivity with plugins that integrate into git, google, youtube, sublime and much more.
• More than 1000 contributors.  Since its Open Source, the code is available for free on GitHub and you can add your modifications, plugins and themes. Just submit your pull request!
• More than 140. Don’t be a dull bird using the old BASH simple theme. Add colors and other functionalities by using any of the themes.

Still not convinced?

Check this screen captures:

And these are just some of the ways your terminal or console can look like. Pretty awesome right?

Now, how do I install Oh My ZSH on my Mac?

Dude, its a piece of cake. Just go to your Terminal or iTerm2

And type:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

This will do the entire process of installing all the required pieces to make it work. Once it finishes you can go ahead and customize the themes & plugins.

Picking a different theme

As default, Oh-My-ZSH comes with the theme default which is robbyrussell. But if you want to choose a different please go to the Themes page in GitHub. Choose the one you like the most and then use your favorite text editor (nano, vim, emacs, sublimetext or even textedit) to edit the file .zshrc located on your home folder. Below are the commands to open such file on nano & vim:

nano ~/.zshrc

vim ~/.zshrc

Then you will have to locate the string:

ZSH_THEME=robbyrussell

And change it to the theme that you selected, on this case I chose the theme called Blinks, so I went ahead and edited the .zshrc file and put this string instead of the one above:

ZSH_THEME=blinks

Then save the file and exit the editor. Please note that you will NOT see an immediate change on your current session. You would have to start a new terminal session to see the new theme applied there.

Now if you are a free soul like me, then you might want to set the value to random, that way each time you open the terminal you will experience a new theme until you find the one that you love the most. To enable this awesomeness simply use this string instead of the two previous ones:

ZSH_THEME="random"

Cool? Dude you know it is cool!

So, what about plugins?

Just like Themes, enabling and disabling plugins is done thru a text editor and your file .zshrc. You will need to look for the string:

plugins=(xxxx)

Where xxxx can be anything.

Since you are on Mac, I suggest all these plugins to be enabled:

plugins=(brew rails git ruby terminalapp sublime screen rvm perms osx history github encode64)

But there are several more, just go to the Plugins page on GitHub to learn about them all.

Please note that the same rule of the themes applies here, you will need to save the file and open a new session to see the plugins enabled.

So that is all folks. Start experimenting with Oh-My-ZSH and help the creator of this awesome shell by buying some swag for you and your friends!

Comment below if I missed anything! Thanks!