Grunt and Composer: Getting friendly with the Terminal

@ben and @swalkinshaw: thanks for the screencasts on Grunt and Composer respectively. I’m definitely looking forward to the much ballyhooed screencast of the stack.

Seems like moving forward with Roots, I’m going to need to get much more friendly and comfortable with the Terminal (I’m on a Mac). I noticed in the screencasts that each of you was using an interface in place of Terminal. @swalkinshaw, looks like you are using something called iTerm.

@ben, I noted that you said you were using something called oh my zsh and that it somehow had some integration with Sublime 2 (which is what I use for my text editing) so my ears pricked up there.

I know it’s a little off topic of Roots, but could you guys share your Terminal setup and its benefits?

I’d keep it simple to start with. The default Terminal app used to be pretty bad. It’s actually gotten much better in Mountain Lion at least. I use iTerm2 but mostly just because I’m used to it.

It’s important to know that a terminal application is basically an environment for a Shell. The default is Bash. Ben and myself both use Zsh but I’d advise to just stick with Bash while learning. Honestly there isn’t that much of a difference and it will be more confusing since if you’re looking for help, people will just assume you use Bash.

You’re welcome! Scott and I both use iTerm. Like you mentioned, I’m using oh my zsh. Scott used to use it but now uses Presto instead.

My .zshrc file has a plugins line that includes the sublime plugin that allows you to use the stt command in the terminal to open up Sublime Text 2

Scott’s dotfiles are also on GitHub although they’re a little outdated

There’s a lot of info available about bash vs zsh if you do some searching, but I don’t think picking a shell is a big deal. It’s more important to become comfortable with basic commands

Ok, excellent. Thanks @swalkinshaw. Appreciate your advice.

Thanks @benword. I really appreciate your feedback and insights.