Filed under: Terminal Tips
Terminal Tips: Personalize Terminal.app
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
friko said 2:41PM on 9-22-2008
Leopard Only.
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Kenneth Hartford said 2:44PM on 9-22-2008
Thanks for nothing TUAW. Do you really need to have an article about this? What's the point? You don't think we could have figured this one out for ourselves?
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masternave said 2:47PM on 9-22-2008
ah... homebrew is very cool looking.
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a ham sandwich said 2:58PM on 9-22-2008
homebrew + antialiased text FOR. THE. WIN.
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M7 said 3:08PM on 9-22-2008
@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.
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infty@thisisnotmyrealemail.com said 3:16PM on 9-22-2008
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,
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M7 said 3:22PM on 9-22-2008
@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.
Kevlar said 3:17PM on 9-22-2008
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.
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john said 3:39PM on 9-22-2008
Slow news day?
I need an article on how to resize a finder window
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Jonathan Wise said 3:53PM on 9-22-2008
Anyone know how to do something like this for the Cygwin command window?
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Fortis said 4:53PM on 9-22-2008
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
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Christina Warren said 5:40PM on 9-22-2008
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 ;-)
Axel Caballero said 8:34PM on 9-22-2008
It was useful to me, never looked into there. Nice tip!
(grumpy people)
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Ian Scott said 5:18AM on 9-23-2008
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
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Ben Stiglitz said 12:55PM on 9-23-2008
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.
Ben Stiglitz said 12:53PM on 9-23-2008
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.
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Samuel said 9:18PM on 9-24-2008
Thanks, I never looked in the preferences for this before, much nicer!
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Prentiss Riddle said 9:54PM on 12-06-2008
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.
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