How to Make Your Terminal Cool 

If you say something about Linux, the first thing that may come to mind is a guy with a multi-monitor setup opening up a terminal, typing fast, and doing some magic. Yes, the Terminal is a huge part of the Linux journey. 

There was a time when Linux was essentially a massive terminal into which you typed commands and got the job done. Now, there are a lot of different GUI applications, desktop environments, and other things to make it easier for a regular user to use.

Despite all these great GUI tools, the terminal is still the most important part of any Linux distro. If you want to experience Linux to its fullest, you must master the terminal. If you want to show off some cool tricks with your terminal, why not make it a bit gorgeous? Let’s find out how many ways you can choose to make your Linux terminal look cooler.

Types of Terminal Shell

So, what is a terminal in Linux? Whenever you open one, you will see a random black screen where you can put commands and make your Linux distribution work. You might be surprised to learn that there are various types of terminals that provide various opportunities to make your Linux experience more enjoyable. 

Well, even I was surprised at how versatile just the Terminal shell can be in your Linux system! This is the beauty of Linux, you can do anything you want. Let us explore the different types of Linux terminals that you can use. 

Although there are a lot more terminal shells for you to use, we will only discuss the three most commonly known terminal shells: bash, zsh, and fish. 

Bash

If you run a Linux distro of your choice, chances are most distros will use the Bash shell. In an older version of Mac, they used to use the Bash shell but they have changed that recently.  

The bash terminal can do almost everything you may want in your terminal. From creating an alias to executing whatever command you want. Unfortunately, Bash lacks customization options, making it an unappealing option for us because we want to make the terminal cooler. 

Zsh 

A bit more advanced and my personal favorite, the zsh terminal, can be seen in one of the most famous distros, Manjaro. Remember when I said that macOS recently changed from Bash to something else? Yes, you got it right! macOS is currently using the zsh shell.

The best part about Zsh is the fantastic customization options, the color customization made it more popular among regular users. Zsh has a framework called “Oh My Zsh.” which is used to customize the shell.

The best part of zsh, the reason it is my favorite terminal shell is that it offers spelling correction and can share the history among multiple shell instances. Suppose you’ve written a command 5 minutes before, this command will be saved in the history section. Now, you want to write that command again, whenever you will type it the shell will offer an option to autocomplete the command making the system more efficient for everyone.   

Fish

The full meaning of the Fish shell is the Friendly interactive shell, the name says it all. Fish is here to make the terminal system easier and friendlier for Linux users. The customizability of Fish is just more powerful and a lot cooler than the zsh or bash. If you want to make the shell experience more comfortable and make it cooler than the fish is the way to go. 

One of the best features of the fish shell is syntax highlighting which usually makes your syntax red if you have typed the wrong command or green when the command is right. It is very common for us to do mistakes while working in the Linux terminal but the Fish shell just makes it easier to detect the error and fix the issue. 

Now, you know which shell to go for if you want to make it cooler. Let us discuss how you can achieve this.

Making the Shell Cooler

 There are certain things you can do to make your shell a lot cooler one you can achieve by just tweaking some settings and the other needs some work to do. 

Make it wobbly

Adding a simple wobble effect can make your terminal appealing to the newcomer and based on the shell you can use different methods. If you are a gnome desktop user then you can go to gnome extensions and download the Compiz alike windows effect in your system toggle the effect on and make the effect work. 

In KDE you can achieve this from settings and Desktop Behaviour and then enable the wobble effect from there.   

Work on the Preference section

The transparent effect also looks cool to the eye, and to do so, you can change it easily. Click the option on the top right or left, depending on your system, and go to Preferences. There, you can change the theme, and make it dark to look cooler. 

There is also a setting for transparency where you can make the terminal transparent. Also, there are some other customization options, like setting the font size, and some basic changes that you can make to make it work better for you.

Covert to Fish

As previously stated, the Fish shell is the most attractive and feature-rich shell for you. You may have fish already installed if you are working on distros like Garuda Linux or something else. In other cases, where Fish is not the default shell, you have to follow some steps. Please keep in mind that all the commands we are mentioning here are applicable to Debian-based Linux distros. If you are using something else, a slight change will be needed in those commands.

Install Fish

sudo apt install fish 
Code language: Bash (bash)

From this step, the commands should be identical for all kinds of Linux distros. So, no matter which one you are using from here you can just copy and paste the command we are using. Type Fish in your terminal. 

fish
Code language: Bash (bash)

Make Fish your default shell using this: 

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish
Code language: Bash (bash)

Create the config file in your system to make it work properly. 

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish

vim ~/.config/fish/config.fish
Code language: Bash (bash)

Enjoy! If you are into further customizing the shell then the best video will be to follow the steps mentioned in this YouTube video: 

Some Cool Commands to Make your Terminal Interesting

You are not working in your terminal but want to show off some cool stuff in it. Here are some commands that can make your friends say “Wow!”

Cmatrix

Remember Matrix? one of the best and most influential films starring Keanu Reeves! And remember that matrix code? That green line with random words Yes, my friend, you can also show that in your terminal by just typing cmatrix.

However, if you are using a gnome-based distro, you must first install this before running this command. 

sudo apt install cmatrix
Code language: Bash (bash)

On other systems, you might just have to change the APT to something else. Now, you’re ready to go! Just type cmatrix and show what your terminal can do. 

SL

You love Thomas the Tank Engine as a child, and that cho! Choo! sounds that the steam engine made. Unfortunately, you cannot make Thomas himself appear in the terminal but you can make some steam locomotives appear in your terminal. 

Similarly to before, install sl into your system using these commands in a Debian-based system and change apt to something else depending on the system.

sudo apt install sl
Code language: Bash (bash)

Now, just type sl in your terminal and look at that train go!

Telnet

20th Century Fox might have one of the most well-known intro in the movie industry. Do you know that you can make that logo appear in the terminal by following a few simple steps?

First, install Telnet in your system

sudo apt install telnet
Code language: Bash (bash)

Change the apt to the designated command if you’re not using a Debian-based distro. 

Now, just type Telnet and see the magic!

Conclusion

Today, our tech industry basically runs and relies on Linux completely. Developers from different parts of the world are now making different distros to make Linux easily usable for home or general purposes. The customizability of a Linux system is no closer to that of a Windows or Mac system. 

We have shown you different methods to make your terminal look a lot cooler than before. So, just learn those tricks and make your Linux more interesting and fun to learn.