I’m compiling some notes here for those upgrading their Mac to Catalina because there’s a lot of contradicting information online. This article is meant for a developer audience.
Your terminal will default to zsh instead of bash.
From what I have experienced so far, my terminal workflow is nothing different. I work out of my terminal directly for interacting with Git. You may have some issues at first. The following are some things to note about customizing zsh.
- You do not need to download a framework like oh-my-zsh.
- Instead, create a system file called .zshrc in your root directory. This file is very similar to your .bash-profile.
- Move your bash settings over to your new .zshrc file.
- I had issues with running Ruby on Catalina, so I had to add the following to my .zshrc file: export GEM_HOME=”$HOME/.gem” I also had to update Xcode.
Update. I went back to using bash because I was having a lot of issues once I started working with Slate again (it uses Ruby).
Basically, I was not able to bundle install on one of my projects. I finally got it to work after switching back to Bash and following the instructions on this StackExchange answer.
I’ll update this article if I come across more modifications I’ve had to make since upgrading to Catalina.