Customize your terminal (Oh My Zsh) on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

3 min readJan 4, 2020

In this blog post, I will cover how to install Oh My Zsh and How to customize your terminal and make it fancy.

Update the packages

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt upgrade

Install prerequisite packages (ZSH, powerline & powerline fonts)

sudo apt install zsh
sudo apt-get install powerline fonts-powerline

Clone the Oh My Zsh Repo

git clone https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git ~/.oh-my-zsh

Create a New ZSH configuration file

cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc

Install PowerLevel9k!

git clone https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k

Set up a theme for your Terminal — Open `.zshrc` File using gedit editor

gedit .zshrc

And change and put these lines :

ZSH_THEME="powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k"POWERLEVEL9K_DISABLE_RPROMPT=true
POWERLEVEL9K_PROMPT_ON_NEWLINE=true
POWERLEVEL9K_MULTILINE_LAST_PROMPT_PREFIX="▶"
POWERLEVEL9K_MULTILINE_FIRST_PROMPT_PREFIX=""

Change your Default Shell

chsh -s /bin/zsh

for this command to be effective you need to restart your system.

Oh My Zsh Terminal

After restarting your terminal will look like this :

If you want Syntax Highlighting

Clone the ZSH Syntax Highlighting

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git "$HOME/.zsh-syntax-highlighting" --depth 1

Add syntax-highlighting in .zshrc Configuration

echo "source $HOME/.zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh" >> "$HOME/.zshrc"

And If anything goes wrong, you can revert back to your default shell by

chsh -s /bin/bash

If you are a data science enthusiast and using anaconda then you need to add these lines below in zshrc file.

Open a terminal and

gedit .zshrc

add these. Make sure to change your username after home.

# >>> conda initialize >>>
# !! Contents within this block are managed by ‘conda init’ !!
__conda_setup=”$(‘/home/yourusername/anaconda3/bin/conda’ ‘shell.bash’ ‘hook’ 2> /dev/null)”
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
 eval “$__conda_setup”
else
 if [ -f “/home/yourusername/anaconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh” ]; then
 . “/home/yourusername/anaconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh”
 else
 export PATH=”/home/yourusername/anaconda3/bin:$PATH”
 fi
fi
unset __conda_setup
# <<< conda initialize <<<

Mine looks like this.