5 Plugins that can make your Terminal smarter

Adam00
3 min readDec 21, 2018

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As a developer, you work with Terminal everyday. You can obviously enjoy using a better Zsh shell with smarter selection, redirection, syntax colouring and listing by just a few plugins.

1. tree

Tree is a recursive directory listing command that produces a depth indented listing of files, which is colorized ala dircolors if the LS_COLORS environment variable is set and output is to tty.

$ brew install tree # installation### How to use
$ tree
## Advanced Options
$ tree -C -L 2 -F -I 'node_modules'
# -C : colourized output
# -L : level(s) to be displayed
# -F : show folder(s) with '/'
# -I : ignore pattern

You can type man tree to see more options

2. zsh-completions

Additional completion definitions for Zsh. (select by tab)

$ brew install zsh-completions # installation

3. autojump

A cd command that learns — easily navigate directories from the command line

$ brew install automjump  # installation

Put the following lines to ~/.zshrc.

[[ -s `brew --prefix`/etc/autojump.sh ]] && . `brew --prefix`/etc/autojump.sh### How to use$ j Desktop # jump to desktop pattern
$ jc ruby # jump limit to folders under current directory
$ jo ruby # jump to a folder and open it using default opener (e.g. Finder)
$ jco ruby # combination of jc and jo

4. zsh-syntax-highlighting

Fish shell like syntax highlighting for Zsh.

$ brew install zsh-syntax-highlighting # installation

5. ccat

Colorizing `cat`.

$ brew install ccat # installation

You can type ccat --help to see more options

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Adam00

Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.