Install Oh-my-zsh and powerline fonts on Ubuntu 18.04

I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my X1 Carbon (1st Gen that sat under the bed for years), and I'm actually enjoying using this notebook again!

The first thing I did was install a few basics that included oh-my-zsh. I love the information that the prompt displays for your git repos. Shown below is oh-my-zsh using the agnoster theme. 

Oh-My-Zsh with Git Repo Status

However, if the powerline fonts aren't installed, then it doesn't look so great. The icons show up as boxes with X's in them. 

I didn't have the powerline fonts installed, so I searched for the correct way to install the fonts on Ubuntu and found that a bunch of people were having difficulties.

I ended up following the directions on the powerline font github repo's README, and it worked without too much effort, so I figured I would post all the steps I followed to get oh-my-zsh installed and configured the way I like it.

Oh-My-Zsh and Powerline Font Install

First, install oh-my-zsh.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

After the install, you end up with a .zshrc file in your home directory. I updated the .zshrc file to use the agnoster theme instead of the default theme of robbyrussell. Just update the ZSH_THEME value.

ZSH_THEME="agnoster"

Second, install the powerline fonts so you can see the nice status icons for the current directory of your git repos. You can install the fonts this way:

sudo apt-get install fonts-powerline

Or by cloning the git repo and running their install script:

git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git --depth=1

cd fonts

./install.sh

cd ..

rm -rf fonts

If after running those commands (which probably only needed to consist of the apt-get install), the prompt for zsh has not started showing the nice status icons and colorized branches, then you can update the fontconfig information by creating a file in this directory (create the directory if it doesn't exist):

~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d

Then copy this file to ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d.

Followed by running the font config cache command, which will force the font config cache to be update (-f) and display status information (-v).

fc-cache -vf 

It was after I ran the fc-cache command that I noticed the terminal show the git repo status information with the branch and status icons. I used both the apt-get install fonts-powerline method, and the 

Using git with Google Code projects on Windows...

I decided to host a project on Google code, and chose git as the source repository since that is what I am familiar with. The Google code project page presents an auto generated password when you first create your project for use when pushing changes. You can regenerate this password if you need to.

One drawback of using an auto generated password is that they are purposely hard to remember, and therefore are not quite as easy to type in accurately on the command line. The projects source section suggests the following:

Add the following to your .netrc. 
machine code.google.com login <you google email address> password [generated googlecode.com password] 

I had no idea what a .netrc file was, so I looked around. At least on *nix machines, the .netrc file contains auto login information that can be used by ftp and rexec commands.

From what I read it sounded like I just needed to create the .netrc file in my user's home directory with the line as it is listed above.  I created the .netrc file, but I was still being prompted for my username and password when I would attempt to push changes to the repository. I searched a little more and I found a comment by named Dave Borowitz saying that the file should be named _netrc on Windows machines.

I changed my file name to _netrc and then I was able to push changes without entering my password.  

I didn't spend a great deal of time looking for the answer, but I feel like I was a bit lucky as well. I think there should be a mention about naming the file _netrc on the Google project source page.