Overview

A walkthrough of modernizing a mostly-empty .zshrc with Starship, fzf, zoxide, eza, bat, and zsh plugins — plus fixing mojibake icons by installing a Nerd Font and pointing Terminal.app at it.

I used to run Powerlevel10k for my prompt and peco for fuzzy history search, but at some point my .zshrc had been stripped down to almost nothing — just a PATH export for Turso. Time to rebuild it with a more current toolset.

Starting point

Before touching anything, I checked what was actually installed:

  • .zshrc contained a single PATH line, no prompt framework, no plugins.
  • Neither Powerlevel10k nor peco were present anymore.
  • Homebrew had none of starship, fzf, zoxide, eza, bat, or fd installed.

Since I wanted to compare before/after, I backed up the existing dotfiles first:

mkdir -p ~/.dotfiles_backup
cp ~/.zshrc ~/.dotfiles_backup/.zshrc.bak_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)
cp ~/.zprofile ~/.dotfiles_backup/.zprofile.bak_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)

The new toolset

Purpose Before After
Prompt none Starship
History / file search peco (removed) fzf — Ctrl+R history, Ctrl+T files, Alt+C cd
cd builtin zoxide — z <frecency-ranked dir>
ls builtin eza — icons + git status
cat builtin bat — syntax highlighting
Completion / highlighting none zsh-autosuggestions + zsh-syntax-highlighting

Installed in one shot:

brew install starship fzf zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting zoxide eza bat fd

fzf 0.74 supports fzf --zsh for one-line shell integration, so there was no need for the old $(brew --prefix)/opt/fzf/install script dance.

The resulting .zshrc:

# Turso
export PATH="$PATH:/Users/t29mato/.turso"

# --- Starship prompt ---
eval "$(starship init zsh)"

# --- fzf (history search: Ctrl+R, file search: Ctrl+T, cd search: Alt+C) ---
source <(fzf --zsh)

# --- zoxide (smarter cd, use `z` instead of `cd`) ---
eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"

# --- eza (modern ls) ---
alias ls="eza --icons"
alias ll="eza -l --icons --git"
alias la="eza -la --icons --git"
alias lt="eza --tree --icons"

# --- bat (modern cat) ---
alias cat="bat --paging=never"

# --- zsh-autosuggestions ---
source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

# --- zsh-syntax-highlighting (must be sourced last) ---
source /opt/homebrew/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

I verified it loaded cleanly with script -q /dev/null zsh -i -c 'echo OK' — running zsh -i -c directly (no pty) throws a harmless can't change option: zle from the plugins trying to bind keys with no terminal attached; under a real pty it’s silent.

Fixing mojibake icons

First load with eza --icons produced garbled glyphs in front of every filename — Japanese filenames themselves were fine, it was specifically the icon characters. eza’s icons come from the Nerd Font glyph set, and Terminal.app’s default font (SFMono-Regular) doesn’t include them.

Fix: install a Nerd Font and point Terminal.app’s profile at it.

brew install --cask font-hack-nerd-font

Then set the font on the active Terminal.app profile via AppleScript (found the current default profile with defaults read com.apple.Terminal "Default Window Settings", which returned Basic):

osascript \
  -e 'tell application "Terminal" to set font name of settings set "Basic" to "Hack Nerd Font Mono"' \
  -e 'tell application "Terminal" to set font name of (default settings) to "Hack Nerd Font Mono"'

New tabs picked up the font immediately and ll rendered correctly — per-extension icons (.json, .srt, etc.) and distinct folder icons, with the Japanese filenames intact.

Result

❯ ll
.rw-r--r--@ 345k t29mato 15 Apr 19:43  260614_カウンセリング.json
.rw-r--r--@  57k t29mato 15 Apr 19:43 󰨖 260614_カウンセリング.srt
drwxr-xr-x@    - t29mato 31 Jul 04:27  Applications
drwx------@    - t29mato 22 Apr 21:13  Desktop
...

Total time from empty .zshrc to a working Starship + fzf + Nerd Font setup: one brew install, one rewritten .zshrc, and one osascript call. The old dotfiles are still sitting in ~/.dotfiles_backup if I ever want to diff against them.