First I'd like to thank all the people who replied to my first post and provided so much valuable information! Since then I've been trying to force myself to get comfortable with using the terminal! To this end I've been running Sway as my Desktop Environment and printed out a cheat sheet to place next to my screen.
Now, a paragraph deep, for the question(s):
How do y'all customize your terminals? I'm not looking for tutorials, just your preferences. How long did it take for you to settle on your favourite? What did you prioritize when customizing? What customization are you fondest of?
Thanks in advance to any and all replies, hope to hear from you all soon!
I put a dozen aliases in bash_aliases and call it a day. If I find myself in the terminal I don't want to be hamstrung with some unique configs that nobody can help me with and I can't remember making.
I mostly learned from some of the terminal customization which came stock with Manjaro when I was first learning Linux. So when I made the jump to Arch, I customized my terminal with fsh with the powerlevel10k theme and text highlighting. I also modified some of the default text colors to a green color to evoke green phosphor CRT terminals.
I use Fish as my shell. It's got some really nice convenience features, without needing customization, which I find useful. If I'm working in a VM or some server for a bit longer, I'll often just install the fish package and have my normal level of (good) usability.
Downside is that Fish uses somewhat different syntax than Bash, so I can't just copy-paste more complex commands into there. But yeah, then you'll see me run bash, then the complex command in there, and then I'll exit back out of there.
Thanks for the post! Never would've known about Starship. Your setup seems a bit feature-rich for me at the moment but it's nice knowing its an option.
I tried light theme for 0.000000128 seconds, and in that time my eyeballs melted out of my head and onto my keyboard.
I set up a couple profiles with different colored backgrounds so that I can easily visually distinguish terminal windows when I have several open at once. For example, I usually switch the profile to one with a red background when I ssh into a server to help avoid confusion about which system I'm running commands on. I also cranked up the font size a bit in all profiles to make it easier for me to read.
It’s super nice. I still often type out the full path, but it sure is nice when I’m going levels deep to just type the destination directory and be there.
I only use one terminal (Alacritty). I do nothing more than just setting size, font, and colors. I basically took the config with me when I migrated from kittie to Alacritty. My kittie config mainly came from when I initially setting up xterm and later urxvt.
I love consistency and minimalism when it comes to setting up any kind of software. So my terminal configuration is basically the same since ca. 2007.
[window]
dimensions = { columns = 120, lines = 32 }
resize_increments = true # gets ignored, though
[font]
size = 14
normal = { family = 'DejaVu Sans Mono', style = 'Regular' }
[colors.primary]
foreground = '#d3d7cf'
background = '#2e3436'
[colors.normal]
black = '#2e2e34'
red = '#cc0000'
green = '#4e9a06'
yellow = '#c4a000'
blue = '#3465a4'
magenta = '#75507b'
cyan = '#06989a'
white = '#d3d7cf'
[colors.bright]
black = '#555753'
red = '#ef2929'
green = '#8ae234'
yellow = '#fce94f'
blue = '#729fcf'
magenta = '#ad7fa8'
cyan = '#34e2e2'
white = '#eeeeec'