5 Steps to a Beautiful Terminal That You’ll Love Using

Let’s give your command line a makeover

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

If you’re here, chances are you’re not a big fan of your terminal, and entering commands is probably on your painful-moments list as a developer. Been there. But we spend a significant amount of time in there, so we’d better make it enjoyable to be as productive as we can.

And as you probably spent a significant amount of time customizing your code editor — choosing the best font, installing the Material Icon theme to have great-looking files and folders, and choosing the best extensions out there — well, there’s no reason not to give your terminal a little makeover, too.

I customized mine referencing several different articles on the web, docs, and troubleshooting forums. I always found those articles were going far too deep in technical twists while all I wanted was to make my terminal more friendly to use quickly. So I thought I’d make an article in this spirit of keeping it simple for everyone.

At the end of this article you, too, will look for any reason to hit the command line, so let’s begin!

Screenshot of my customized terminal after applying the configs explained here

1. The Terminal: Setting Up Hyper

There are several terminal emulators out there, and even though other emulators like iTerm2 seems faster (at the time of writing this article), it’s only for Mac users. I wanted to make this post useful for everyone, so I’m going for Hyper.

Hyper is cross-platform (it’s packaged with Electron to achieve this), and version 3 is a huge improvement in terms of performance. It was indeed their prime concern for building v3 — you can read more about this new version of Hyper on their blog. And it’s icon has only gotten more beautiful. So download Hyper, and let’s move on.

Hyper terminal download page

Now, a bit of configuration. First, we need to go to the .hyper.js file (notice the . at the beginning of the file name), which is located in…