Setup

Opal is designed to be simple to use, and easily extendable. The heart of Opal is Bash. There’s also some value for Neovim, Vim, and Git users that one can opt into. If you’re someone that loves to live on the command line, then it should be easy to create the experience you want for yourself. Natively, Bash doesn’t make it easy. So Opal has a wealth of functions to provide things you might want.

Upon installation, a ~/.bashrc and a ~/.bash_profile will be created for you. The recommendation is to use the these versions as a foundation and copy commands from your original versions into these. You might find that some of the things, you’ve previously added to your dotfiles are no longer needed.

About the Installation

Upon successsful installaion of Opal, three conditions will be met:

  1. The opal framework will be installed into $HOME/opal/

  2. Existing configuration files for specific locations will be backed up. The current file will be given a new name in the same directory that includes the timestamp in unix seconds. e.g. ~/.bashrc becomes ~/.bashrc.1733439725

  3. A new configuration file will be created that points to a corresponding file in the opal directory configuration file will be created that points to a corresponding file in the opal directory. For example $HOME/.bashrc will contain “file include” of $HOME/opal/bash/bashrc.bash.

Installation

There are two installation methods — via file download and git clone. Most people will want to use the file download method. This will provide you greater control over the Opal version you’re running. The second method - git clone - is for developers who would like to contribute improvements to the Opal Project

Install via File Download

This is the easiest method, recommended for most users.

  1. Visit the Opal Github Repository.

  2. Click the green “Code” button above the file list.

  3. Click the “Download ZIP” text.

  4. Save the file opal-master.zip file to your system.

  5. Extract the file opal-master.zip

  6. cd opal-master

  7. Run the Install Script in your Terminal

$ ./install.bash

Install via Git Clone

This is the method for project contributors.

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/andrewwoods/opal opal
$ cd opal
$ ./install.bash

After Installation

Begin by opening a new terminal window. You’ll want to ensure the environment is fresh. Reloading ~/.bashrc in your current terminal window may have unexpected results.

Want to improve your terminal UX? If you’re an iTerm2 user, you’re in luck! You can add the Opal Dark or Opal Light color palette to your current profile. These palettes attempt to provide better accessibility by improving color contrast by tweaking the default ANSI color values.

A backup of your main config files were created during the installation process using the current UNIX epoch timestamp. As you manually copy things back in, this is a good time to clean house. As you comb through your original config files, you get to evaluate what it still worth keeping.