Colors for OS X Terminal and iTerm With lolcat

We are not satisfied with boring syntax highlighting with transparent iTerm2! We want to add more colors, fun and animation for our setup! Diwali Festival is coming in India, then Christmas! It can not happen that only the server’s SSH will get rainbow colors or Rackspace Cloud Monitoring Tool will blink like twinkle twinkle little stars! If you belong to the category of hardcore Command Line Interface user, chance is that you will not like it; but imagine using Herrie like Command Line MP3 players!

 

Colors for OS X Terminal and iTerm With lolcat – What is Our Setup

 

Follow our guide – iTerm2, Homebrew and ZSH Installation on OS X. There are important linked further tutorials. If you are not using this type of setup, honestly you are not enjoying your Mac to the fullest. OS X Terminal is still in infancy, it is only required to run commands which needs sudo.

 

Colors for OS X Terminal and iTerm With lolcat – What is Our Setup

 

If you want to install lolcat on OS X in the way we do on Linux :

you have to use Terminal. Because that Ruby part will require sudo and Homebrew will have issue. But we will use iTerm2 plus Homebrew to install lolcat, Cowsay and Fortune. Run brew doctor first and resolve any issue. Update Homebrew (brew update). Here are the commands to get our things installed :

Exit iTerm2 and again launch.

Run :

You should read Examples of Pipe or Pipelines Command to get the most fun as we will pipe things to lolcat for color. The advantage of lolcat is that, if we do not pipe, it will not interfere our syntax highlighting.