In part Five of my "Awesome Terminal upgrades" series, we will look at some programs that will really enhance your overall productivity in your terminal, there are plenty more out there, but these are my favourites.

They will work in both BASH and ZSH on both macOS and Linux.

Install Homebrew

The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)

We will be using Homebrew to manage everything for us, if you don't have it installed, go ahead and do it now!

echo “[ -f /usr/local/etc/bash_completion ] && . /usr/local/etc/bash_completion” >> ~/.bash_profile

bash-completion

Programmable completion functions for bash

brew install bash-completion@2

the@2token indicates the major version 2 of bash-completion (the latest version, at the time of this writing, is 2.8) which must be used for Bash 4.1 and higher

Bash completions work really well by tabbing twice <tab><tab> and seeing a list of possible options for your current program.

fzf

A command-line fuzzy finder

fzf allows you to find files faster and filter them out better than relying upon find alone.

brew install fzf

hstr

bash and zsh shell history suggest box - easily view, navigate, search and manage your command history.

hstr is brilliant, there are so many times I can't recall exactly how to type out a command. This goes a step further than ZSH autocomplete or suggestions in that it allows you to search and filter previous commands super fast in a nice intuitive interface.

brew install hstr

exa

A modern version of ‘ls’.

exa provides a lot more options than ls, and outputs information in a nice readable way.

brew install exa

thefuck

Magnificent app which corrects your previous console command.

Despite the name, this is a brilliant tool that allows you to correct your mistakes much faster than normal.

brew install thefuck

hub

A command-line tool that makes git easier to use with GitHub.

hub is a great tool released by github themselves that allows you to interact with their website and manage things like pull requests, all from the commandline.

brew install hub

If you want a more comprehensive list of applications, you should check out Terminals Are Sexy

Feel free to suggest any more!