This is a little writeup on how to get a very useful terminal setup on any Debian based Linux. Example of my setup below:

Example screen setup
Example screen setup

My custom .bashrc file, give me a customized prompt (current directory and size as well as previous commands exit status). In addition to this it provides a whack of aliases to make commands simpler to type, as well as some pseudo functions. Download from pastebin HERE

Useful apt-get aliases:

install – “sudo apt-fast install”
addrepo – ‘sudo add-apt-repository’
searchIn – “apt-file search”

Useful shorthand aliases:

murder – ‘kill -9’
alert – Useful for things like “make; alert” and when complete will pop up an on screen notification.

hist – Grep through bash history, very useful.

Useful pseudo programs:

extract – Automatically appends the needed options to tar for you.

netinfo – shows network information for your system

downforme – Check to see if a site is down for everyone or just me
cp_pro – copy with progress bar
mkdir_go – make a directory and enter into it
bu – Back up a file by appending UNIXTIME.backup

Installing my custom bashrc:

  1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apt-fast/stable
  2. sudo apt-get update
  3. sudo apt-get install apt-fast apt-file nano lynx more less tmux byobu
  4. Open bashrc from pastebin above and save to ~/.bashrc
  5. Open a terminal and try it out!

To get the same color scheme (solarized dark256) as I use do the following:

  1. Get the color scheme for tmux HERE just copy 256 pallet to ~/.tmux.conf
  2. Vim plugins and highlighters HERE
  3. Edit ~./vimrc and add ‘set number’ and ‘set relativenumber’
  4. Solarizer ‘ls’ dircolors HERE
  5. Gnome-term solerized pallet HERE. I had to select the background to be slightly darker than the tmux status bar manually in gnome-term as I did not like the blue/green default.