Take control of your console in Windows with Babun, Oh My Zsh, and Powerline fonts

I accidentally stumbled upon a console named Babun. It is based on Cygwin so if you like a Linux like environment you should definitely check it out. It comes with a lot of cool packages installed and uses the fabulous oh-my-zsh as default shell.

Download Babun and run install.bat – wait for a couple of minutes. Once installation has finished Babun will automatically start.

To style Babun edit the oh-my-zsh configuration by typing nano .zshrc .  Look for ZSH_THEME=”babun” and change it to whatever theme you like (you can list all themes with the command ls -l ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes ). Personally, I’m a fan of the them agnoster so I have change the line in the oh-my-zsh configuration file to ZSH_THEME=”agnoster”.

Now either close the all instances of Babun and reopen or run the command source ~/.zshrc  to invoke the changes. At this point you will probably see some strange icons if you use the agnoster theme. This is due to the fact this theme uses the Powerline fonts.

So go ahead and visit the Powerline git reposity. Naviage to the font you like – I use DejaVu Sans Mono – and download it by clicking it and then clicking raw. Once downloaded install the font in Windows. Navigate to your fonts and find the font to check the name of it. In my case it is DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline.

Once the font is install you need to tell Babun to use it. In Babun type nano ~/.minttyrc   and copy/paste the below into the file (you paste by right clicking).

BoldAsFont=no
Columns=150
Rows=55
Font=DejaVu Sans Mono for Powerline
FontHeight=10
Transparency=low

ForegroundColour=#A0A0A0
BackgroundColour=#1B1D1E
CursorColour=#A0A0A0
Black=#1B1D1E
Red=#F92672
Green=#82B414
Yellow=#FD971F
Blue=#268BD2
Magenta=#8C54FE
Cyan=#56C2D6
White=#CCCCC6
BoldRed=#FF5995
BoldBlack=#505354
BoldGreen=#B7EB46
BoldYellow=#FEED6C
BoldBlue=#62ADE3
BoldMagenta=#BFA0FE
BoldCyan=#94D8E5
BoldWhite=#F8F8F2

Once you have pasted it save the file by pressing ctrl+x – press y for yes – press enter to overwrite. Now quit Babun and restart it. you should now be using the Powerline font and everything should look like the screenshot below.

To remove the user name (like on the image above) set DEFAULT_USER  in ~/.zshrc . The line is probably not there so you should just add it like this DEFAULT_USER=yourusername

Set Babun home directory to Windows user home directory

You might want to set the home directory to your current windows user. This can be done via these simple steps.

1. Close Babun
2. Create an environment variable for HOME = C:/Users/my_account_name
   1. Press the windows key and type env
   2. Open ‘Edit envirnoment variables for your account’
   3. Create a new variable with HOME as variable name and C:/Users/my_account_name as variable value
3. Open Babun and run babun install
4. Restart Babun

If you experience some issues with zsh after this try running these commands

compaudit | xargs chmod g-w
cp ~/.zcompdump{,-$HOSTNAME-$ZSH_VERSION}

This fixed it for me.