Get Started
← Level 0: The basics · Mission 4 of 5

Make your terminal look like a pro's (and actually more useful)

Oh My Posh swaps PowerShell's plain prompt for a colourful status bar: your folder, your Git branch and changes, how long the last command took and whether it failed. fastfetch adds a system-info banner on top. Free, no account, and every change can be undone.

30 minBeginnerTools: FreeStep 1 free
Tested 9 Oct 2026 · Oh My Posh 31.6.0, fastfetch 2.69.0, Meslo Nerd Font 3.5.1, Windows PowerShell 5.1, Windows 11
A prompt that shows your folder, Git branch and changes, how long each command took and whether it worked
125 built-in themes you can try with one line, plus a ready-made orange and black Cracked AI theme to download
A system-info banner with fastfetch, plus a version that's safe to screenshot
  • Exact undo commands for every change
Before you start
  • Windows 11 with Windows Terminal (it comes with Windows 11; open Terminal from the Start menu), or a Mac with Homebrew ↗. Mac lines are labelled in each step
  • About 240MB of disk space: Oh My Posh is 15MB, the Meslo font pack about 200MB once installed, fastfetch under 20MB
  • An internet connection for the downloads
  • Optional: Git, so you can see the Git part of the prompt. Level 0's install anything from GitHub sets it up
01/06Install Oh My Posh0 done
STEP 01 of 06~3 min

Install Oh My Posh

Oh My Posh is one small program that draws your prompt. Nothing changes until you switch it on in step 3.

  1. The prompt is the text before your cursor. PowerShell's own one only shows the folder you're in. Oh My Posh replaces it with a row of coloured blocks that answer questions you'd otherwise type commands for:

    Top: plain PowerShell prompts showing a long folder path. Bottom: the same commands with Oh My Posh, showing short folder names, the Git branch main and a changed-file count
    Real output, drawn with the MesloLGM Nerd Font in Windows Terminal's default colours. Same folder, same two commands. The ~1 tells you a file has changed before you even run git status.

  2. Open Terminal and install it with winget:

    Windows
    winget install JanDeDobbeleer.OhMyPosh --source winget
    Mac (official docs)
    brew install jandedobbeleer/oh-my-posh/oh-my-posh

  3. Close the terminal, open a new one, and check it's there:

    Terminal
    oh-my-posh version
    Output
    31.6.0
    TipCan't use winget? The same program is a single file, posh-windows-amd64.exe, on the GitHub releases page ↗. On a Mac, Oh My Posh's docs recommend iTerm2 over the built-in Terminal app, which only shows 256 colours.
✓
Checkpointoh-my-posh version prints a version number.
If it breaks'oh-my-posh' is not recognised
'oh-my-posh' is not recognised
Close every terminal window and open a new one. New programs only show up in windows opened after the install.
Still stuck? Ask the community
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