Exploring the World of Terminal and Shell Tools

As a virtualization engineer, I’ve recently found myself spending more time in the command line, and I realized that I was completely ignorant when it comes to the world of terminal and shell tools. Sure, I had heard of iTerm2 and ZSH, but I never really explored them beyond the basics. However, after watching some VMworld presentations by Cody de Arkland, I decided to dive deeper into this topic.

My Journey Begins

I started with a great blog post from aptgetupdate.de, which provided a basic setup for iTerm2 and ZSH. The post mentioned one specific font, but I decided to install the complete Powerline package as well as the Nerd Fonts to give me full choice of fonts to play around with. While the Agnoster theme is nice, the Powerlevel9k-theme for ZSH is beyond awesome but also very intimidating.

Putting Together My Terminal Setup

So far, I based my config on examples and made minor changes for my own needs. Here’s how my terminal looks like right now:

My ZSH Shell

And here are all the moving parts you need for a similar setup:

Recently, another TAM requested some info on this topic in VMware’s Slack, finally giving me the push to publish as I had this post for ages in my drafts. While bringing myself up-to-date with NSX-T, I struggled with the terminology in relation to my existing NSX-v knowledge. There are quite a few awesome blog posts around -v or -T and I’m trying to compare the “edge” at a high level.

Comparing NSX-v and NSX-T

I hesitated to make a public post out of it since I’m myself quite new to NSX-T, but I included some basic training that got me from “zero” to at least one step further – more readable handwriting. We all take it for granted – there is a whiteboard in the room during the VCDX defense, and on December 13th, 2018, I received an email that confirmed that I passed the VCDX certification.

For me, this marks the end of a chapter which I would call the VCDX journey, and I have to thank many, many people for supporting me along the way up to this point. Easily the longest supporter of my efforts has been Bilal.

Conclusion

In conclusion, exploring the world of terminal and shell tools has opened up a new world of possibilities for me as a virtualization engineer. While I’m still in the early stages of learning, I’m excited to see where this journey takes me. I hope that this post can serve as a starting point for others who are looking to enhance their command line experience. As always, please do your own research and never stop exploring!