Mastering Zsh on macOS: A Guide to Oh My Zsh, Plugins, Themes, and Productivity Hacks

Unlock the potential of your terminal with Zsh and Oh My Zsh — how to install and customize with plugins, themes, and aliases.

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting. Oh My Zsh is a framework built on top of zsh that is structured to allow it to have plugins and themes.

from https://ohmyz.sh/ official site

You can install zsh on Mac with Homebrew:

brew install zsh

To visit Oh My Zsh page:

Oh My Zsh - a delightful & open source framework for Zsh

To install, open your terminal and copy&paste the following:

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

You can find superb plugins in this GitHub account:

zsh-users

Plugins — Manual Installation:

Navigate to plugins folder (~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins) from your terminal:

cd ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins

You can now “git clone” the plugins you select among the GitHub projects such as:

git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

To enable the plugin, you need to add it to the config file (~/.zshrc). Navigate back to the root and edit the file. I prefer to use “nano” for editing. It is a small editor for the terminal. You can install nano with Homebrew:

brew install nano

Let’s edit the config file:

nano ~/.zshrc

Find “plugins” section:

After edit:

Now, you have to start a new terminal session or run the following command (for the changes to take effect without restarting your terminal:

source ~/.zshrc

Let’s check (I typed the letter “p”):

Voilà!

Plugins — Installation with Homebrew

Let’s install “zsh-autosuggestions”:

brew install zsh-autosuggestions

Do what it says under “Caveats” section; edit your “~/.zshrc” file and add the following to the end of the file.

source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

After that, restart your terminal or run the “source ~/.zshrc” command.

Let’s now install “Fast Syntax Highlighting (F-Sy-H)”:

brew install zsh-fast-syntax-highlighting

Do not forget to perform the instructions the “Caveats” section; edit your “~/.zshrc” file and add the following to the end of the file.

source /opt/homebrew/opt/zsh-fast-syntax-highlighting/share/zsh-fast-syntax-highlighting/fast-syntax-highlighting.plugin.zsh

It is not written there but restart your terminal or run the “source ~/.zshrc” command.

Let’s check (I typed the letter “p”):

To accept the auto-suggested command, press the → key (forward-char widget).

Voilà!

Default Themes

Themes

All the current themes can be found in the “themes” directory:

open ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes

In order to enable a theme, set ZSH_THEME to the name of the theme in your “~/.zshrc” file. The default one is “robbyrussell”. If you do not want any theme enabled, just set its value blank.

Aliases

You can set personal aliases by creating a file with “.zsh” extension and save it under “~/.oh-my-zsh/custom” folder.

These can also override those already provided; for the full active list, run the “alias” command:

alias

Now, I will navigate to “custom” folder:

open  ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom

There you will find a sample “zsh” file named “example.zsh”:

example.zsh

I will create a file named “update-stuff.zsh”:

nano  ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/update-stuff.zsh

This will be the content of my file:

alias update-stuff='echo "Updating Homebrew..." && brew update && brew upgrade && brew upgrade --cask --greedy && brew cleanup && echo "Updating App Store apps..." && mas upgrade && echo "Update finished!"'

“mas” (included in the command above) is a command-line interface for the Mac App Store. You can install it with Homebrew:

brew install mas

After saving the file, run the following command (for the changes to take effect without restarting your terminal:

source ~/.zshrc

Now you can run “update-stuff” command from your terminal (as I type, it is already being auto-suggested):

Happy Coding!

Giphy — Friends — Janice

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_shell
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/from-linux-to-mac-building-the-perfect-development-machine-in-2025-14db582f239f
https://stephencharlesweiss.com/oh-my-zsh-and-persistent-aliases
https://www.maketecheasier.com/update-apps-using-terminal-mac