Ars Asks: Share your shell and show us your tricked-out terminals!

I didn’t think I’d ever arrive at his method of only running manually compiled Slackware—and, indeed, 20 years on, I’m still not even close—but the guy had a point. The more I used a Unix-y shell at work, the more I began to miss it at home. Windows Vista and its early WDDM woes had reduced my previously badass main PC with two Nvidia 7900GT cards in SLI to a stuttering BSOD-spitting mess, and the future of Microsoft OSes looked bleak—Windows 7 wouldn’t be along to change the situation for years. Exposure therapy to the bash shell brought me to the tipping point, and I jumped ship to the Macintosh side of the house. It was a move calculated to give me the best of all possible worlds—a good graphical interface with the same bash shell under the hood that I’d come to depend on at work. The timer_stop function also has the job of converting the timer into a human-readable format, and it’s probably messier than it needs to be. I’m no developer, though, so this is what Past Lee settled on after a few hours of searching through examples. But I just can’t find a reason to switch that sticks with me. Changing terminal applications inevitably means things look different—ANSI colors are reinterpreted or mapped oddly, highlighting uses different tones, or a blue I’m particularly fond of is suddenly a different blue, and I have to spend 20 minutes fiddling with ANSI escape sequences to try to make it match again. Life’s too short for that. I’m a huge fan of the Monaspace family of typefaces for use in one’s terminal, and I love and use Monaspace Neon—it features in all the terminal screenshots in this piece. I know terminal fonts are about as personal as picking a brand of underwear, but after literal decades of trying various options, Monaspace Neon is the closest I’ve ever come to finding a typeface that approximates my monospaced platonic ideal. Your mileage will vary, of course, but I like it, I use it, and I feel that stumbling on it has meant the end of a career’s worth of searching. I can’t claim to have thought up any of the customization in this article. The pieces have accreted over time, gobbled up from years and years of StackExchange posts and Reddit threads. Whenever I saw a neat thing, I’d copy the code and try it out. And now you can do the same if any of this is useful to you. But this, finally, brings us to the whole point of the article—what are your cool terminal tricks and hacks? We’d love to see how you rock the command line, from carefully cultivated Neofetch login splashes to fully from-scratch terminal replacements, and all points in between. We’ll promote the best stuff below the article for everyone to see. So share! Share your terminals with us, and let us all rejoice, for we are here in the post-GUI era, and it’s nowhere near as scary as I used to think it would be. At least the colors are nice.