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So, you’re using a tiling window manager and want to rice your terminal? Well, I’ve done all the hard work for you.

This guide is mostly targeted at Arch linux users

Result

Installation

First of all, you will need to install some packages. Some of those packages are from AUR so it would be useful to have an AUR helper like paru or yay installed.

The terminal itself: alacritty
The best shell of all: fish
Cool looking things: neofetch and pfetch
Fonts: ttf-fira-code
A theme picker for alacritty: alacritty-themes
Lolcat to make text rainbow: lolcat

If you have paru, you can just run this command to install all the packages:

paru -Syu alacritty alacritty-themes ttf-fira-code fish neofetch pfetch lolcat

Configuring alacritty

After opening alacritty, open it’s configuration file located in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml.

Here is my recommended configuration to get started with:

font:
  size: 12
  normal:
    family: Fira Code
  bold:
    family: Fira Code
  italic:
    family: Fira Code
env:
  TERM: xterm-256color

You will likely need to adjust font.size to match your preference!

The next step is to set a theme. Here is a cool trick: run neofetch before running alacritty-themes to have some example text to judge the themes.

So, in a nutshell:

neofetch && alacritty-themes

Press arrow up and down until you find a theme you like. Then press enter.

Configuring fish

Setting the default shell

First of all, you need to set fish as your default shell.

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

And then enter fish by either restarting alacritty or simply running fish.

Oh my fish!

Now that you have fish as your default shell, you can install oh-my-fish. It is a theme manager for fish and you can use it to install themes very easily.

Simply running this command should do the trick:

curl -L https://get.oh-my.fish | fish

Now you’ll need to pick out a theme you like from this list of oh-my-fish themes

Then install the theme using omf install <theme name>.

So for example, if you like boxfish run this:

omf install boxfish

Setting a fish greeting

The fish_greeting function runs every time you open a new terminal, kind-of like ~/.bashrc

We’re going to make it run pfetch every time you open fish, and pass it into lolcat to make it rainbow.

function fish_greeting
  echo
  pfetch | lolcat
end

funcsave fish_greeting

Congratulations

You did it! See the results by restarting alacritty.

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