Are you looking for a fun way to refresh your Raspberry Pi’s command line experience? You don’t have to look far to find a fun and easy way to overhaul your Pi’s terminal. With Oh My ZSH or Starship, you can have a completely personalized Pi experience this weekend.
You don’t need a new app to make your terminal look good
If you’re tired of the way your Raspberry Pi’s terminal looks, you don’t really need a new app to personalize your experience. While there are certainly other terminals, customizing your command line is actually much simpler than this.
To get a pretty (and feature-rich) Terminal experience, all you need to do is install a few extensions that work directly in LXTerminal.
- Brand
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Raspberry Pi
- Processor
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Cortex-A72 (ARM v8)
With the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, you can create all sorts of fun projects and upgrade the gadgets in your home. You can also install a full desktop operating system and use it like a regular computer.
Oh My ZSH is easy to install and theme
If you want a completely different experience than the original bash shell that comes with Raspberry Pi OS, then Oh My ZSH is perfect for you. Its installation is simple and requires a single command:
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
During the installation process, you will be asked if you want to set ZSH as your default terminal environment. This is entirely up to you, but if you choose not to, you can still access ZSH by simply typing “zsh” in your terminal.
Once installed, you’ll find that Oh My ZSH offers a sleek and fun experience out of the box. There are dozens of included themes to choose from, but I personally stuck with the default one.
The fun thing about Oh My ZSH is that it not only overhauls the look of your terminal, it also adds a lot of extra features. With over 200 plugins available, you can truly customize your command line experience.
One of my favorite features is the GitHub integration. When you enable the Git plugin in your .zshrc file, you’ll see the branch name, whether it’s dirty or clean, whether there are staged changes, and more, all in your command line without running a single command.
There are even more plugins available that are also created by the community, making Oh My ZSH a fun, personal and unique terminal experience.
Starship lets you continue using Bash but with themes
If you’re not looking to swap bash for zsh, then Starship is perfect for you. In fact, Starship works with most terminal environments (like zsh, Fish and many others). Starship is also fully cross-platform and consistent across every platform. This means that it not only works on Linux (like Raspberry Pi OS), but also on macOS and Windows, looking the same across all operating systems for a consistent experience.
Once installed, you activate Starship via a simple modification of your .bashrc, .zshrc or whatever configuration file you use for your terminal. Installation is simple with just one command, just like Oh My ZSH:
curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh
If you like Starship so much that you also want to use it on your Mac or Windows computer, you can also use Homebrew or Winget to install Starship.
Similar to Oh My ZSH, Starship offers an extremely simple customization engine and is also very customizable. However, you should at least have a Nerd font installed and enabled in your terminal. Starship will work without it (like I did), but installing and enabling it will give you a richer visual experience.
There are also dozens and dozens of plugins for Starship, including a similar Git experience. However, there are also more fun (and useful) plugins, like the battery health indicator. If your battery drops below 10%, an icon will appear on your terminal, warning you that it is time to plug it in.
Starship is the extension I will personally use because I love that it can run on my Mac, my Windows desktop, and all my Linux servers, giving me the same experience everywhere. Plus, because it uses cross-platform TOML files for its theme engine, once I have it set up exactly how I want it, I can easily transfer it to all my systems for a uniform terminal setup everywhere.
The advantage of Oh My ZSH and Starship is that they are operating system independent. This means that if you later replace the Raspberry Pi operating system with another operating system, you can simply port your configuration files and enjoy the same terminal experience in your new operating system.
Now that your terminal has a new coat of paint with added features, why not tackle some other fun weekend projects for your Raspberry Pi? One project I’m looking forward to doing when I eventually have a few more Pis is building an e-ink weather station for my office.
