Sweet Shell 2024: With Oh-My-Zsh, Neovim, Starship, and Demo Mode. For macOS, Linux, and Windows

My terminal emulator and shell setup for macOS, Linux, and Windows. AKA "Ultimate Terminal Setup" for me.

My Wishlist

Give serious effort to try Ghostty 👻 once it's out of private beta.
Give Warp another shot. I tried it years ago and stayed with iTerm2, though warp has better AI support and says it's much faster.

Eternal Terminal to replace Mosh. I like mosh, but et has scrolling support!
GitHub's VSCode theme, for iTerm. I've settled on GitHub's light/dark them in VSCode for now, and wanted my iTerm to match.
exa, a modern replacement for ls
Starship is my daily shell theme. I love it!

The GUI that emulates a text terminal, and runs a shell

Z shell (zsh) is my favorite. Here's how to make it awesome.

macOS: Now the default in 10.15+ at /bin/zsh or manually install a newer version with brew install zsh to /usr/local/bin/zsh. Default is fine in 99% of cases.
Linux: If which zsh shows nothing, then install with apt/yum/apk. Next, change your login shell with chsh -s $(which zsh)
Windows 10: I recommend WSL/WSL2 with Ubuntu and zsh installed there, rather than a zsh.exe alternative.
Zsh "Configuration Manager": Oh-My-Zsh adds a bunch of bonus features and plugins to your shell. Check their GitHub wiki for more info and how to customize.
Oh-My-Zsh has themes, which mostly affect the prompt features like git branch, current directory, etc. but also has colors you can tweak (see below.)
Here's my custom Zsh prompt theme with 🐳 emoji and a "presentation mode" option. I use this to keep the shell minimal without distractions for presenting.
Daily theme: Starship!

I like having matching true-color themes in all my shell apps.

GruvBox is my default for everything. I'm now using the community fork which is better maintained. It supports light and dark modes, as well as various contrast options. The contrib repo has the theme for different app formats, including iTerm2, SpaceVim, Tilix, and tmux.
True Color enabled in iTerm2, Zsh, and Vim. Also, check the Gruvbox notes on true color. In 2024 I think this works by default with things in this list, but it's good to know ways to test it.
Assuming you're using Oh-My-Zsh above, you can replace the default theme in .zshrc env ZSH_THEME with this Gruvbox colored one, or just tweak the colors of the full theme list. This really only affects the prompt, not the terminal colors, which are controlled by your terminal emulator.
INSANE Wild Cherry theme. I love this, but is it a daily theme? Not sure.

Neovim (install info), which you run as nvim once installed (I add shell aliases for alias n=nvim and alias vim=nvim. to my ~/.zshrc
In 2024 I discovered Neovim Kickstart (and this great video by the author) as the best way to get started with everything.
My Old Plugin Manager "vim distro": SpaceVim makes good feature-rich defaults (works with both vim/nvim). I stopped using it because of Neovim Kickstart above.

Some fonts are designed for shells and programming. I only use those.

Nerd Fonts takes those popular programming fonts and adds extra glyphs and icons for better support in shell tools.
I prefer using Homebrew to install those fonts on macOS and Linux. You can always just download one or all of them from Nerd Fonts and usually just dbl-clicking a font file in macOS or Windows will install it.
One of my favorite fonts: Sauce Code Pro Font from Nerd Fonts which gives me Vim + Powerline + icons. That's all you need, but if you're curious: It's based off another mod to support this font with Powerline in VIM, which itself is based off the original Adobe Source Code Pro open source font. Whew, what a rabbit hole. 😵
Italics enabled in iTerm/Vim. It makes comments easier to visualize I think.