Customizing a Shell Session

Customizing a shell session

Let’s look at ways to customize our shell session.

When we open a new Bash shell session, our shell executes a series of configuration scripts. We can modify these scripts to customize our environment to our liking. We can set our default terminal editor, create shortcuts for commands, change the information displayed in our prompt, set environment variables, and more.

There are two types of shells: login shells and non-login shells. The type of shell determines which files we use to define the settings. If we put the settings in the wrong place, they won’t apply. This can be a massive source of frustration when trying to set things like environment variables for certain processes, ...