Terminal and Shell

A simple guide on how to configure a personal terminal and shell

T. Yang

October 30, 2025 · 2 min read

Prerequisite #

Some nerd font of your choice. Find more via Nerd Fonts.

Some terminal of your choice, popular ones include
Some shell of your choice, popular ones include
1. zsh
2. fish
3. tcsh
4. bash

Now we want to use some fancy terminals and shell just because we can. Let us install zsh and WezTerm in this guide.

We will now install and configure zsh with oh-my-zsh.

In command lines under Ubuntu, we run:
```
> apt install zsh
```
We can do a simple check to see if zsh is installed properly:
```
> zsh --version
```
That is pretty much it, although we can now employ oh-my-zsh for zsh configuration. We can check for more information on its GitHub page. We now install oh-my-zsh via terminal:
```
> sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
```
Further customization can be performed by editting ~/.zshrc. For example, let us default in entering our home directory at shell launch.
```
> cd ~
> echo "# Enter home dir" >> ~/.zshrc
> echo "cd ~" >> ~/.zshrc
```

We will now install and configure WezTerm with starship.

For a WSL setup, it is adviable to install our terminal under Windows file system. In terminal we run:
```
> winget install wez.wezterm
> winget upgrade wez.wezterm
```
And that’s pretty much it, we can customize WezTerm and other terminal such as pwsh with starship. To do this, with your terminal under Linux file system:
```
> curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh
```

Now that we have both our terminal and shell installed, we can get starship to customize our terminal via:

> cd ~
> echo "# Init starship for zsh" >> ~/.zshrc
> echo 'eval "$(starship init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

We can now apply some starship customization to our terminal by including a starship.toml file in ~/.config:
```
> starship preset nerd-font-symbols -o ~/.config/starship.toml
```

There are many customizations that we can apply to these terminal and shells to improve our own efficiency, work habits, and the enjoyment of it.

One thing to take note for VSCode integration with zsh is that we should set for VSCode to also employ zsh over bash in its builtin terminal.