If you’re a GUI kind of OS X user, who is just tinkering with the Terminal to see what it is all about, you’ll be glad to know that the look of the Terminal can be customized beyond the black text on white background or white text on black background that you normally see.  Simply launch the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/), and select Terminal—>Window Settings… from the menu.  A window will open.  Click on the drop-down menu that says Shell. First, select Display.  Here, you can tweak basic settings like the appearance of the cursor and what default text you would like to use. Now, grab that drop-down menu again and click on Color.  Here, you can customize what colors you would like the background, normal text, bold text, selections, and the cursor to be.  For even more fun, click Use an image for the background to browse a particular image you’d like for your Terminal sessions.  Even easier: simply drag a pic into the Terminal while holding down the Option key to set it as the background.  Now simply click the  “Use Settings as Defaults” button at the bottom of the window to save these settings.