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Terminal Tips: Personalize Terminal.app

by Cory Bohon Sep 22nd 2008 at 2:00PM


Tired of the bland, black and white look of Terminal.app (/Application/Utilities)? By tweaking the preferences in Terminal, you can easily change the theme, and look of your Terminal windows. Open Terminal and click Terminal > Preferences (or press command + ,).

Clicking on Settings will allow you to see the available themes. Terminal ships with several nice themes including basic, grass, homebrew, novel, ocean, pro, and red sands. In addition to using these, you can create your own by clicking the "+" button at the bottom.

You can tweak a theme by clicking the theme and using the options in either the "Text" or "Window" tabs. You can change the font style/size, text color, type of cursor, color of cursor, etc. When you are ready to make the these your default, just click the default button at the bottom of the theme list. Now all of your Terminal windows will load with the settings you specified.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and Terminal Tips sections.

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Tired of the bland, black and white look of Terminal.app (/Application/Utilities)? By tweaking the preferences in Terminal, you can easily...
 

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Prentiss Riddle

I wish somebody would do a properly designed study to evaluate Terminal color and font schemes from an ergonomic/accessibility perspective.

I had some eyeglass prescription issues for a little while, which made me suddenly aware that not all text is created equal, but it's hard to find the optimal configuration through subjective tinkering alone. Sometimes what looks sharp in the moment is fatiguing after extended use.

Terminal gives you the power to create both great and god-awful configurations. It would be nice if a couple of the presets were validated by vision specialists.

December 05 2008 at 3:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ben Stiglitz

Don’t forget that you can change the appearance of a tab or window for just the current session using the Inspector (Cmd-I); it’s got a live preview of the current window so you can see just what you’re going to get.

September 23 2008 at 12:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ian Scott

Is there any way to get different Terminals to open with different settings?

I have a 'bigterm' applescript to produce something like a full screen terminal ... but the only way I've managed to do it is with some UI Events comamnds to change the text size ... not very nice. I would love to be able to open different terminal prefs for different apps - anyone have any idea how to do this?

Cheers

September 23 2008 at 5:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Ian Scott's comment
Ben Stiglitz

Ian,

You can create settings profiles which launch specific apps in the Preferences. These are then accessible either from the File menu or Terminal’s dock context menu.

September 23 2008 at 12:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Axel Caballero

It was useful to me, never looked into there. Nice tip!
(grumpy people)

September 22 2008 at 8:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bebop

I think all the built in themes kind of suck. I use this mod and I think it rocks:
http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6

September 22 2008 at 4:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to bebop's comment
Christina Warren

Me too! After I do a clean install, I always have to install that theme and the SIMBL Terminal colors so that bash looks the way God intended ;-)

September 22 2008 at 5:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jon Wise

Anyone know how to do something like this for the Cygwin command window?

September 22 2008 at 3:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Eric

Slow news day?

I need an article on how to resize a finder window

September 22 2008 at 3:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kevlar

Still no way of getting rid of that scrollbar, but not the buffer eh? I've missed my scrollbar-less terminal since I installed Leopard.

September 22 2008 at 3:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
infty@thisisnotmyrealemail.com

M7,

It's in the Preferences pane. It's not hidden. If you've been using OS X and Terminal for several years and haven't figured out that you can, you know, *change preferences* in the Preferences menu, your parents' license to procreate should be retroactively revoked.

Best,

September 22 2008 at 3:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to infty@thisisnotmyrealemail.com's comment
M7

@thatguywiththefakemail

Well, I didn't bother looking at the preferences, especially not for the one in the terminal.app. What cool things would anyone expect there.

And thanks for the nice tone. Must feel great beeing you.

September 22 2008 at 3:22 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
M7

@Kenneth
I really like this tip and didn't know about this feature.
Have been using OSX for 4 years now...

So please don't be so quick judging the usefulness.

September 22 2008 at 3:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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