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Part 3 - Customize Your Environment

This part is entirely optional. In it I have a number of recommendations as to how to customize your command line "environment" so that it will be a little easier to use. There is nothing here that is required for later on.

Solarized Terminal Profiles

The Terminal app allows you to choose from a number of options for how the terminal window is displayed. Open it's Terminal menu Preferences submenu and a number of options can be defined. Click on the Profiles tab and see the choices. Of the default options, the Homebrew profile is a useful choice — it is bright text on dark, which I personally find easier for coding.

I personally use a dark background, but with a more subtly colored text based on the Solarized. You can download and open my preferences using the wget command.

$ cd ~/temp
$ wget https://github.com/ChristopherA/dotfiles/blob/master/install/osxterminal/christophera-dark.terminal
$ open christophera-dark.terminal
$ rm christophera-dark.terminal

In the Terminal's Preferences, in the General pane, set the "On startup open: New window with profile" and then select 'christophera-dark'

You can set Atom's theme to use the a similar set of dark solarized colors. The theme is called Solarized Dark and it comes installed by default with Atom and can be activated by going to the Themes section in the Settings view command + -) and selecting it from the Syntax Themes dropdown menu.

CLI Colors

You can enable syntax colors for how various commands output text the command line. To see this, try this:

$ export CLICOLOR=1

Now type ls -la and you will see that directories and files are listed with different colors.

For compatibility with the solarized terminal theme, I also set some specific colors that I find blend well:

$ export LSCOLORS=gxfxbEaEBxxEhEhBaDaCaD
$ export LS_COLORS="di=36;40:ln=35;40:so=31;:pi=0;:ex=1;;40:bd=0;:cd=37;:su=37;:sg=0;:tw=0;:ow=0;:"

Now if you want these colors to be displayed ever time you open Terminal, you'll need to add them to a special file so that they will be always loaded. This file is called is ~/.bash_profile.

$ atom ~/.bash_profile

Add all three lines (with out the $), save, quit Terminal and launch it again, and you'll see all your color settings as you prefer.

There is a brew app called grc (for Generic Colourizer) that adds colorization to a lot more commands than the above does.

$ brew install grc
==> Downloading http://korpus.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/software/grc/grc_1.9.orig.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Caveats
New shell sessions will start using GRC after you add this to your profile:
  source "`brew --prefix`/etc/grc.bashrc"
==> Summary
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/grc/1.9: 32 files, 148K, built in 3 seconds
$

Like with CLI colors, you'll need to add a line to your to your ~/.bash_profile. I recommend a slightly different syntax than what brew suggests:

if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/grc.bashrc ]; then
  . $(brew --prefix)/etc/grc.bashrc
fi

Bash Completion

There are a number of apps that don't allow tab completion of partial text the way others do. the brew app called bash-completion (from http://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org) will make many more commands support tab completion.

$ brew install bash-completion
==> Downloading http://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org/files/bash-completion-1.3.tar.bz2
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Patching
patching file bash_completion
==> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/bash-completion/1.3
==> make install
==> Caveats
Add the following lines to your ~/.bash_profile:
  if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion
  fi

Homebrew's own bash completion script has been installed to
  /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d

Bash completion has been installed to:
  /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d
==> Summary
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/bash-completion/1.3: 188 files, 1.1M, built in 20 seconds
$

To install bash-completeion one time type . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion. You can see all the apps that this brew recipe adds by typing 'complete -p'

Once again, if you want this permanently, is are some more lines to add to your ~/.bash_profile

if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion ]; then
  . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion
fi

Better Prompt

You can customize the shell prompt (the part before $) in quite a few ways, but I find the brew recipe called bash-git-prompt to be quite powerful, especially once you start using git.

$ brew install bash-git-prompt
==> Downloading https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt/archive/2.3.5.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Caveats
You should add the following to your .bashrc (or equivalent):
  if [ -f "$(brew --prefix bash-git-prompt)/share/gitprompt.sh" ]; then
    GIT_PROMPT_THEME=Default
    source "$(brew --prefix bash-git-prompt)/share/gitprompt.sh"
  fi
==> Summary
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/bash-git-prompt/2.3.5: 21 files, 120K, built in 2 seconds
$

To run it one time, type:

GIT_PROMPT_THEME=Default
source "$(brew --prefix bash-git-prompt)/share/gitprompt.sh"

If you like it, add this to your ~/.bash_profile:

if [ -f "$(brew --prefix bash-git-prompt)/share/gitprompt.sh" ]; then
  GIT_PROMPT_THEME=Solarized
  source "$(brew --prefix bash-git-prompt)/share/gitprompt.sh"
fi

More Git & Github Tools

You will be using git and the GitHub serve regularly, so these tools add additional functionality.

The first is called hub, and it provides all the functionality of git, but adds some GitHub specific features.

$ brew install hub

Since hub is compatible with git, I alias it in my ~/bash_profile

alias git=hub

The brew recipe git-extras adds a number of additional useful git commands, and they are compatible with hub:

$ brew install git-extras
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/git-extras-2.2.0.yosemite.bottle.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring git-extras-2.2.0.yosemite.bottle.tar.gz
==> Caveats
Bash completion has been installed to:
  /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d
==> Summary
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/git-extras/2.2.0: 91 files, 388K
$

Finally, GitHub offers a useful Mac GUI app called GitHub for browsing git repositories.

$ brew cask install github-desktop

Prepare OSX Script

All of the the installation and customization features suggested by this tutorial are also automated as part of a prepare-osx.sh script in https://github.com/ChristopherA/prepare-osx-for-webdev, however, I recommend that you do the tutorial by hand first to understand what this script does.