This may seem ridiculous, but I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to add the zenburn color scheme to my terminal program, iTerm. Since I had trouble doing it, and it turned out to be way easier than any of my internet searching suggested, I figured I’d chronicle it here. Hopefully it’ll save someone else some time.

Searching for how to add zenburn produced a whole lot of results telling me to add one script or another to one of the various dot files for bash. I agonized over how to add it correctly, and when I did, why it didn’t actually affect anything. Then, I asked a friend. Turns out, the answer is this:

  1. Go to the iTerm 2 Color Scheme repo on Github
  2. Click, “Clone in Desktop” and save the file somewhere
  3. Open iTerm’s preferences, and choose the “Colors” tab
  4. Choose “Import…” from the drop down at the bottom that says “Load Presets”
  5. Choose the file from wherever you saved it
  6. Enjoy your new color scheme

Hope I saved you some time!