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 simple and fun way to overhaul the terminal on your Pi. With Oh My ZSH or Starship, you can have a fully customized Pi experience this weekend.
You Don’t Need a New App to Make Your Terminal Look Nice
If you’re tired of the way that your Raspberry Pi’s terminal looks, you don’t actually need a new app to customize your experience. While there definitely are other terminals out there, personalizing your command line is actually much simpler than that.
To get a pretty (and feature-packed) terminal experience, you simply need to install a few extensions that work right within LXTerminal.
- Brand
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Raspberry Pi
- CPU
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Cortex-A72 (ARM v8)
With the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, you can create all kinds of fun projects, and upgrade gadgets around your home. Alternatively, install a full desktop OS and use it like a regular computer.
Oh My ZSH Is Easy to Install and Theme
If you want an entirely different experience than the stock bash shell Raspberry Pi OS ships with, then Oh My ZSH is perfect for you. Installing it 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’ll 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 always access ZSH by just simply typing “zsh” into 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 part about Oh My ZSH is that it doesn’t just overhaul the look of your terminal—it also adds a lot of extra features. With over 200 plugins available, you can really 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, if there are staged changes, and more—all in your command line without running a single command.
There are even more plugins available that are community-built too, making Oh My ZSH a fun, personal, and unique terminal experience all around.
Starship Lets You Keep Using Bash but With Themes
If you’re not looking to trade 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 completely cross-platform and consistent on every platform. This means it works not just on Linux (like Raspberry Pi OS), but it also works on macOS and Windows, looking the same on every operating system for a uniform experience.
Once installed, you enable Starship via a simple edit to your .bashrc, .zshrc, or any other config file you use for your terminal. Installation is simple with a single command, just like Oh My ZSH:
curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh
If you end up liking Starship so much you want to use it on your Mac or Windows computer too, 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 personalizable. You should, at least, have a Nerd Font installed and enabled in your terminal, though. Starship will work without it (like I did), but having that installed and enabled will give you richer visual experience.
There are dozens upon dozens of plugins for Starship, too, including a similar Git experience. However, there are also more fun (and useful) plugins, like the battery status indicator. If your battery drops below 10%, an icon will show up in your terminal, alerting you it’s time to plug in.
Starship is the extension that I’ll be using personally as I love that it can run on my Mac, my Windows desktop, and all of my Linux servers, giving me the same experience everywhere. Plus, since it uses cross-platform TOML files for its theming engine, once I get it set up exactly how I like, I can easily transfer that to all of my systems for a uniform terminal setup everywhere.
The great part about both Oh My ZSH and Starship is that they’re operating system independent. That means, if you replace Raspberry Pi OS with another operating system down the road, you can simply port your config files and enjoy the same terminal experience in your new OS.
Now that your terminal has a new coat of paint on it with extra features, why not dive into some other fun weekend projects for your Raspberry Pi? One project I’m looking forward to doing when I eventually get a few more Pis is building an e-ink weather station for my desk.
