How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Default Terminal App

As a recovering champion yak shaver I used to obsessively customize the heck out of every single environment, operating system, or program I touched. In my wiser years I have to shake my head at such time-intensive exercises.

In my experience the less customization the better. As a dev you should be able to blow away any program, environment, or operating system at the drop of a hat and be functional in minimal time.

In my opinion it is no use being precious about extensive customizations if it takes one a long time to re-create.

Oh, you have a 15-pane tmux with customized run commands? Cool. Your IDE settings.json stretches from here to Timbuktu? Nice!

I really hope you don’t have to reinstall that program/env/OS or, heaven-forbid, have it suddenly become unavailable on your machine due to org security or compliance reasons.

I now prefer to use default programs and commands to get up and running as soon as possible on a clean reinstall of software.

If you must customize, then save a copy of modified settings if possible on separate media or a remote repo to be able to quickly re-customize. However even this I’ve found to be a pain point.

Don’t get me started on devs that hesitate to drop dev databases and re-create from scratch, when this is exactly the purpose of dev databases. They are ephemeral and built to be blown away with regularity.

If you are not able to drop a dev DB for fear of losing info, consider a rake task or seed file to easily re-create this info.

This brings up a corrolary to this principle which is don’t alias destructive commands. Destructive in this case meaning irreversible.

I am big fan of trash the brew cask that gives the user a command to send files to system trash. However I made a huge mistake when I aliased the system’s rm to trash.

It is way too easy to slip into muscle memory in the wrong circumstances. You could one day be SSH’ed into a remote machine and forget this alias isn’t available and rm -rf <something important>. Oops, I just destroyed <something important> instead of sending it to system purgatory.

My point is yak shaving is fun until we have to reset your environment or OS. Always keep a backup, but better yet get to know and love default programs/commands. Usually the functionality you are seeking is already there, e.g. using default zsh functionality instead of the overkill that is oh-my-zsh framework.

Your future self will thank you.

Let's Use Brew Zsh

I’ve had switch default zsh to brew zsh more than once so into a blog post it goes. Luckily macOS seems to now keep system packages more up-to-date than in yesteryear.

$ which zsh
/bin/zsh

brew install zsh

$ which zsh  
/opt/homebrew/bin/zsh

Update iTerm2 or favorite term program to use /opt/homebrew/bin/zsh.

Add the brew zsh to the list of acceptable shells in /etc/shells if you plan on using ftpd.

# Add to list then run command
chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/zsh

Also a cargo cult relic of mine is a .zprofile file, I believe brew used to tell you to do this:

# Homebrew
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

I’m not sure this is even needed anymore but I am too afraid to remove it😭. Maybe a future post…

Let's Use Homebrew curl

While macOS supplies a fine and dandy curl binary for Terminal, let’s install an updated version managed by brew.

First let’s see what is there.

$ which curl                                                                        
/usr/bin/curl

$ curl --version                                                                           
curl 8.7.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0) libcurl/8.7.1 (SecureTransport) LibreSSL/3.3.6 zlib/1.2.12 nghttp2/1.61.0
Release-Date: 2024-03-27
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps ipfs ipns ldap ldaps mqtt pop3 pop3s rtsp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS GSS-API HSTS HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz MultiSSL NTLM SPNEGO SSL threadsafe UnixSockets

Not too shabby. To be frank I’d expected worse 😂 But now let’s install curl via brew. Optionally add binary filepath to $PATH env var so brew’s curl is used instead of system’s.

From curl docs¹:

$ brew install curl

$ echo 'export PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/curl/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

$ source ~/.zshrc

However if you are like me and use .zshenv for your env vars, use the following line in that file instead. (Or use ~/.zshev as target of above echo command.)

export PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/curl/bin:$PATH"

After reloading/sourcing terminal window, we now see this.

$ which curl                                                                 
/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl

$ curl --version    
curl 8.13.0 (aarch64-apple-darwin23.6.0) libcurl/8.13.0 OpenSSL/3.4.1 (SecureTransport) zlib/1.2.12 brotli/1.1.0 zstd/1.5.7 AppleIDN libssh2/1.11.1 nghttp2/1.65.0 librtmp/2.3
Release-Date: 2025-04-02
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps ipfs ipns ldap ldaps mqtt pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp ws wss
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS brotli GSS-API HSTS HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz MultiSSL NTLM SPNEGO SSL threadsafe TLS-SRP UnixSockets zstd

Addendum:

I had to revert the interpolation in .zshenv as it was not working as intended. Using /opt/homebrew hard coded instead of $(brew --prefix).

¯\(ツ)/¯