The terminal emulator and shell are critical components of any developer’s toolbox. The terminal provides features to customize the look and feel of the text interface. Most importantly, the terminal emulator runs a shell. The shell is the program that takes your text input, interprets the input as a set of one or more commands, and passes on those commands to the OS. All emulators and shells provide this basic set of features. What sets them apart are small differences that can sometimes amount to large productivity gains.
The Terminal Emulator
There’s tons of terminal emulators to choose from. The Arch Linux wiki has a non-exhaustive list of terminal emulators. When you compare and contrast the different options, you see a few features are consistently promoted:
- Light CPU and RAM usage.
- 256 Color support.
- Font support.
- Support for tabs.
- Unlimited scrolling.
- GPU acceleration.
In this series, it’s recommended you install xfce4-terminal. The XFCE terminal supports all the listed features except GPU acceleration. If you have been following along since Part 3, you will already have the XFCE terminal installed!
Launch the terminal (super+enter) and right click the XFCE terminal window.
Select the “preferences” option in the popup menu. You should see a window popup
like the one shown below.
Many of the customization options are self explanatory. Hovering over an option will popup a helpful tool tip.
A couple of things are worth customizing. The terminal emulator’s keybindings are under the “Shortcuts” tab. If you’d like to change the color scheme to something more appealing, checkout the Gogh project for a selection of themes with install instructions. If you’re in need of a hacker friendly font, the Source Code Pro font family is your friend. Adjusting XFCE terminal’s scrolling features under “General -> Scrolling” is highly recommended.
The Shell
Much like the terminal emulator, most shells are fundamentally the same but differ in minor ways that can dramatically transform your workflow. This series recommends you use fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Fish is a popular option these days for its ease of configuration and the amount of nice-to-have features you get out of the box.
Setting Your Shell in XFCE Terminal
To pair your shell to your terminal emulator, right click the XFCE terminal and select the “preferences” option in the menu. Under the “General” tab in the “Command” section, check the “Run a custom command instead of my shell” box and type “fish” in the “Custom command” field:
Save your preferences and open a new terminal. You will then see the standard fish prompt:
Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell
Type help for instructions on how to use fish
you@hostname ~>
In the following sections, you’ll get a demo of many of the unique features of fish. The list isn’t exhaustive but it should give you a taste of what fish has to offer.
Fish Features
Autosuggestions
Unlike other shells, fish comes with autosuggestions by default. These
suggestions source from the utilities on your PATH and your command history.
Fish goes even further. You can get completion suggestions from the installed manpages. Just tell fish to parse the manpages by running the following command in the shell:
fish_update_completions
Now, when you type a hyphen after a command, you will get option suggestions with their short descriptions. You can add characters after the hyphen and hit tab to get “combined” option suggestions.
Web Based Configuration
Like any shell, you can configure fish via a series of text files. Unlike most other shells, you can also configure fish via a web interface.
Run the following command in the shell:
fish_config
You should see a browser window popup with your fish settings:
Take some time to explore the options. The web interface is a nice alternative to purely text based configuration.
History Search
The history search function in fish is an improvement over the default provided by other shells like bash. Fish provides an interactive view into your command history.
Type ctrl+r in your terminal. You should see a search prompt appear. Start
typing a command and then make a selection.
Fast Path Navigation
In other shells, you write command aliases to assist in quick directory
navigation. Fish comes with a built in cd function. That is, if you type the
name of a directory and press enter, that’s equivalent to typing cd /path/to/dir:
Additionally, you can cycle through recently visited directories using the
alt+right_arrow and alt+left_arrow keybindings:
Syntax Highlighting
Syntax highlighting in fish helps save you time by catching errors before you execute the command. Fish’s built in syntax highlighting provides a visual cue when a command is incorrect.
The syntax highlighting also works in the context of command options though it may be harder to spot single character errors.
Conclusion
The combination of terminal emulator and shell can make or break a workflow. XFCE Terminal and the Fish shell enhance your experience at the command line. They each provide various quality of life features out of the box where others don’t.
In the next article, you’ll get a look at how to get the most out of your Linux text editing experience.