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I have been trying to customise my iTerm terminal using the steps in this video.

When I open a new quick window using the Control + ’ and type ls, it causes Terminal to disappear. I've attached a screenshot of a popup that occurs before the widow disappears.

Popup where I type ’ls’

I would appreciate any advice in working around this issue.

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  • Out of curiosity, did you install OMZ? If so, uninstall it.
    – Allan
    Feb 20 at 13:57
  • If the problem persists after uninstalling Oh-my-zsh, can you please summarize the steps you did? Doubt that people here want to watch an 18 minutes to figure out what could be wrong.
    – nohillside ♦
    Feb 20 at 14:34
  • And if you open Terminal.app and run ls?
    – Marc Wilson
    Feb 20 at 15:12
  • @allan, what's the reason for just immediately uninstalling it? Could just as easily move .zshrc out the way or something to test.
    – Alex
    Feb 20 at 18:07
  • 1
    uninstalling OMZ did the trick, thanks.
    – Tom L
    Feb 20 at 23:11

1 Answer 1

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When opening a new quick window ... if I type the ls command, it causes the Terminal to disappear.

Start by Uninstalling OMZ (Oh-My-Zsh)

Why? This open source framework causes more problems than it solves. It doesn't really add anything but a flashy UI to a terminal screen. From the OMZ main page:

Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer...but you may feel like one!

Emphasis Mine

There are tons of plugins and themes to supposedly make life easier and make looking at your Terminal screen more enjoyable. Unfortunately, all these plugins, modifications to your Zsh startup files (i.e. .zshrc) can wreak havoc when trying to do things. A simple command like ls shouldn't close a window.

Here are some more recent examples:

What's wrong with OMZ?

There's nothing wrong with it, if you know what you're doing. If you're new -- and we all were at one time -- and you install OMZ, you take away the learning curve that comes with the experience of doing things manually at first.

We all want a fancy, colorized prompt; I fault nobody for that. However, until you painstakingly learn how to create it, you won't understand what is happening when OMZ decides to flake out on you. The same holds true for the Git, Python, and the myriad of other plugins available. If you become dependent on OMZ, you'll find yourself in a difficult spot when things don't work or you find yourself on a system without this little helper.

This is not a "knock" on OMZ. But, keep in mind that OMZ is a community project where people contribute what works for them; it's massive ball of disparate pieces of yarn. What works for you may be a tiny fraction of the OMZ framework. It's best to start defining what you need specifically and making those customizations yourself. As you gain experience, you'll be able to install and troubleshoot OMZ on your own, but then you won't need OMZ.

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    I would add that for shell startup scripts I think you do need to understand what each line does as only you can debug any issues. It is OK to call a function that does one thing (e.g. iTerm integration) but you don't understand how. OMZ however adds a framework and then does many things.
    – mmmmmm
    Mar 5 at 11:05
  • Expanding on that: I am a developer (retired), but less than a month after installing OMZ, I deleted it. Not worth the problems it introduced.
    – WGroleau
    Mar 27 at 17:17

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