macOS terminal setup to boost your productivity
https://alternativeto.net/list/718/macos-terminal-setup-to-boost-your-productivity
macOS terminal setup to boost your productivity
A List by 
POXCreated 2 days ago
This post is not intended to show my complete terminal setup, but to provide you with the best tools out there, which I’ve found after some research and experience. I love doing stuff in the terminal and it’s a major part of my work day as a web developer. If you do too, then I hope you’ll find some useful things here.
-
iTerm2
iTerm2 is a replacement for
Terminal and the successor to 
iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.10 or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted. It's by far the most powerful and flexible terminal app you can use on a 
macOS computer.
To make it more beautiful with a nice and polish UI, I use the Nord color palette with Powerlevel9k and the Hack font in size 12pt. Alternatively, you can use this Material Design color palette, the Dracula theme or the famous Solarized color palette and the Source Code Pro font by Adobe. -
zsh
The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of
GNU Bourne Again SHell, ksh, and tcsh.
Alternatively, you can use
fish (Friendly Interactive SHell) which is an attempts to be more interactive and user-friendly than former shells. The goal is to give the user a rich set of powerful features. -
Oh My Zsh
Now that we’ve got
zsh up and running, it’s time to customize it! You’re probably ready to fire up 
Vim or 
GNU Emacs (or 
GNU nano, I don't judge) and start editing config files but wait for a second, I’ll try to save you some time. Oh-my-zsh is a set of functions, auto-complete helpers, and other useful stuff. Also, it is a very good framework for further customizations.Oh-my-zsh comes with a handful of plugins for different apps –
Git, 
Ruby, 
Ruby on Rails, gem and a lot more. Every plugin has a set of aliases, auto-complete helpers and functions. For example, you can type gstfor git status, or typerdbmfor rakedb:migrate,db:test:cloneand so on. Plenty of good stuff for free. Also, it has tons of themes pre-installed. Check out the entire list of themes with screenshots on the
GitHub repository. Personally, I use Agnoster. -
Zsh Syntax Highlighting
This is a plugin for
zsh whose purpose is to bring fish shell-like syntax highlighting to the Z shell. It enables highlighting of commands whilst they are typed at a zsh prompt into an interactive terminal. This helps in reviewing commands before running them, particularly in catching syntax errors. -
-
fzf
fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. It's an interactive Unix filter for command-line that can be used with any list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc. It's pretty powerful, but alternatively, you can try 
fzy that claims to be a "better fuzzy finder". -
-
z - jump around
z is a
zsh plugin that tracks your most used directories, based on frecency. After a short learning phase, z will take you to the most frecent directory that matches ALL of the regexes given on the command line, in order. For example, z foo barwould match/foo/barbut not/bar/foo.Frecency is a portmanteau of 'recent' and 'frequency'. It is a weighted rank that depends on how often and how recently something occurred. As far as I know, Mozilla came up with the term.
-
-
-
Homebrew
Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on
macOS operating system. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like. -
Cakebrew
Cakebrew is the most convenient way to use
Homebrew for your daily tasks. It does for Homebrew what 
Synaptic does to Linux package managers. It adds a user interface that can search for formulae, install, uninstall and upgrade formulae, tap and untap repos, update Homebrew and run the brew cleanup tool. You can also use this website to search and discover new formulas. -
-
Fink
The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and
macOS. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on macOS ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses 
Debian tools like dpkgandapt-getto provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source. -
Mas CLI
Mas CLI is a simple command line interface for the
Mac App Store. Designed for scripting and automation.
X11
I don't use all these tools: for example, I only use Homebrew and don't have 
MacPortsand 
Fink installed on my computer. I also don't use Prezto since I personally prefer 
Oh My Zsh. I've tested 
Cakebrew a while ago and it's a good piece of software but I have a preference for the command line so I don't use it anymore. So, that's all, here are all the tools I use to boost my productivity when I'm in the terminal (very often).
【推荐】国内首个AI IDE，深度理解中文开发场景，立即下载体验Trae
【推荐】编程新体验，更懂你的AI，立即体验豆包MarsCode编程助手
【推荐】抖音旗下AI助手豆包，你的智能百科全书，全免费不限次数
【推荐】轻量又高性能的 SSH 工具 IShell：AI 加持，快人一步
· 开发者必知的日志记录最佳实践
· SQL Server 2025 AI相关能力初探
· Linux系列：如何用 C#调用 C方法造成内存泄露
· AI与.NET技术实操系列（二）：开始使用ML.NET
· 记一次.NET内存居高不下排查解决与启示
· 阿里最新开源QwQ-32B，效果媲美deepseek-r1满血版，部署成本又又又降低了！
· 开源Multi-agent AI智能体框架aevatar.ai，欢迎大家贡献代码
· Manus重磅发布：全球首款通用AI代理技术深度解析与实战指南
· 被坑几百块钱后，我竟然真的恢复了删除的微信聊天记录！
· AI技术革命，工作效率10个最佳AI工具