The best Linux terminal isn't something you can download, you have to build it yourself like this

Published Oct 11, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Arol is a tech journalist who currently works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to other websites. Arol brings nearly a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. While he's a technology lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones particularly close to heart. You'll normally find him covering news, although he has also written the occasional deal, buyer's guide, how-to post, and round-up. He's also written for Android Police and MakeUseOf. He's also a Political Science student. When he's not writing, you'll probably find him hitting the gym, trying to ace a new hobby, reading his textbooks, or traveling. You can reach him at me@arolwright.com. A polished Linux terminal rarely arrives preconfigured. The Linux terminal fits most people, but the setups people admire are assembled piece by piece around stuff like Zsh and Oh My Zsh. Here is what those tools are, why they make a strong foundation, and whether the effort pays off. What’s Zsh and Oh My Zsh? A powerful shell and the framework that tames it Zsh, short for the Z shell, is a command interpreter that sits between you and your operating system. Paul Falstad wrote the first version in 1990, and it has since grown into a more flexible cousin of Bash, the shell most Linux distributions have long used by default. It handles the same basic commands and scripts, but adds features that Bash lacks or implements awkwardly: smarter tab completion, spelling correction, shared command history across sessions, powerful globbing patterns, and deep customization through themes and modules. Apple made Zsh the default shell in macOS Catalina in 2019, which put it in front of millions of people who had never heard of it. If you've ever wondered why modern macOS uses Zsh instead of Bash, that transition is why Oh My Zsh is a separate project that wraps around Zsh. Robby Russell started it as an open-source framework for managing your Zsh configuration, and it has become the most popular way to get started. Without it, customizing Zsh means editing a .zshrc file by hand and learning how to wire up plugins, prompts, and completions yourself. Oh My Zsh takes care of that scaffolding. It ships with hundreds of plugins and well over a hundred themes, so enabling Git shortcuts, Docker completions, or a new prompt style usually comes down to adding a name to a list in your configuration file. It's confusing, I know. For me, it helps to think of the two as an engine and a toolkit. Zsh is the engine doing the actual work of interpreting commands. Oh My Zsh is a set of presets that makes tuning that engine approachable. You can run Zsh without it, and plenty of experienced users do, preferring lighter plugin managers. But for anyone building a first custom terminal, the framework removes much of the friction. Installation means installing Zsh through your distribution’s package manager, switching your login shell with chsh, and running the Oh My Zsh install script from the project’s website. Within minutes, you have a setup that already looks and behaves differently from the plain Linux prompt most distributions provide out of the box. From there, every choice, from the color of the prompt to the way it completes a path, is yours to change. Why should you build around this, anyway? Your terminal should match how you actually work A default terminal is built for everyone, which means it is optimized for no one in particular. The prompt shows little beyond your username and current folder, tab completion stops at the basics, and every repeated task means retyping long commands from memory. Building your own setup lets you fix those small frictions one at a time, and they add up quickly across a day of work. Consider what a few well-chosen additions change. Autosuggestions display a faded preview of a command you have run before, so a single keystroke can complete something you typed last week. Syntax highlighting colors a command red before you press Enter if it does not exist, catching typos early. A Git-aware prompt shows your current branch and whether you have uncommitted changes without running a separate command. Add a fuzzy finder such as fzf for searching history and files, and the terminal starts to feel less like a place you type instructions and more like a tool that anticipates them. There is also the matter of ownership. A prebuilt environment reflects someone else’s workflow and assumptions, and when something behaves oddly you may not know where to look. A terminal you assembled yourself is one you understand, because you know which plugin added which behavior and which line of configuration controls it. That knowledge carries over to other machines, too. Because everything lives in a handful of plain-text files, you can store your configuration in a Git repository and restore your entire environment on a fresh install in a few minutes. Finally, the process teaches you things. Writing aliases, tweaking your path, and reading plugin documentation builds a working knowledge of how your shell actually operates. Even if you later move to a different tool, that understanding stays useful, and it is rarely something a downloaded, ready-made terminal could have given you. Is it worth the effort? Yes, if you live in the terminal Credit: Steve Larner/How-To Geek The honest answer depends on how much time you spend at the command line. Frankly, if you are the kind of person who uses mostly GUI apps and only runs the occasional sudo apt update, you are probably fine sticking with a default command line. A basic Zsh and Oh My Zsh setup takes perhaps an hour, and a more refined one, with a custom prompt, carefully chosen plugins, and tidy dotfiles, can swallow an entire weekend. If you open a terminal only occasionally, that investment will probably never pay itself back, and the stock shell will serve you fine. There are real costs worth knowing about. Every plugin you enable adds to the time your shell takes to start, and a heavily loaded Oh My Zsh configuration can make new terminal windows feel sluggish. Lazy loading and trimming plugins you rarely use usually fix this, but it takes attention. Customization can also break in surprising ways after an update, and the polished environment you rely on will not exist on a remote server you connect to over SSH, so you still need to remain comfortable in a plain Bash prompt. Scripts are another consideration, since most should still declare Bash explicitly for portability. For developers, system administrators, and anyone who spends hours a day running commands, though, the tradeoff leans clearly in favor of building. The gains in speed and comfort accumulate daily, while the setup cost is paid once and can be reused through a saved configuration. Start small, add one plugin at a time, and keep only what you actually notice using. The goal is not the fanciest terminal, but one that quietly gets out of your way. A terminal worth building, not downloading Zsh and Oh My Zsh give you a flexible base, and a little setup turns it into a faster, more personal workspace. It takes little effort, little management, and for anyone who lives at the command line, the daily payoff makes it worth doing.