Mac Terminal Add-Ons Every Platform Engineer Should Have

Valente Vidal
2 min readFeb 7, 2023

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Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

Homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

This will take some time since it has to download and configure Xcode

Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. The Xcode IDE combined with the Swift programming language make developing apps easy and fun.

This will allow you to easily install packages with simple commands like;

zsh-completions

brew install zsh zsh-completions

Clone this repository into $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins (by default ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins)

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
Add the plugin to the list of plugins for Oh My Zsh to load (inside ~/.zshrc):

plugins=(
# other plugins...
zsh-autosuggestions
)

oh-my-zsh

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Powerlevel10k

https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k#oh-my-zsh

VS Code

https://stackoverflow.com/a/36882426

Open Visual Studio Code
Open the command pallette with Command + Shift + P (or F1)
Type Shell in command palette
Select Shell Command: Install code in PATH from suggested list

Enable Vim Syntax

Test to see whether syntax highlighting is enabled in Vim. If you type :syntax on and the problem goes away then that's your issue, and you can correct it by adding:

syntax on

vim ~/.vimrc
Append the following option:
syntax on

AWS

curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2.pkg" -o "AWSCLIV2.pkg"
sudo installer -pkg AWSCLIV2.pkg -target /

show the full path on terminal

from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27885057/zsh-theme-for-full-path-display-git-changes

You can modify the second line of this file:

~/.oh-my-zsh/themes/robbyrussell.zsh-theme
Which looks like this:

PROMPT+=' %{$fg[cyan]%}%c%{$reset_color%} $(git_prompt_info)'
# ^ replace c with ~
Then source theme again:

source ~/.zshrc

kubectl & kubectx

brew install kubectl 
brew install kubectx
brew install kube-ps1

MenuMeters

Not so much a terminal add-on but a menu bar add-on is the MenuMeters it displays, RAM, Memory, and Networking stats on the menu bar of your Mac, this is incredibly useful to see if something is actually downloading or just stuck.

https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
I have it configured to only show network and memory allocation

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