Own the Terminal

Most people never notice the Terminal application that comes with OS X. It just sits in the Utilities folder, like Megatron beneath the ice of the Arctic (Transformers reference anyone?) For those of us with the need to traverse the text, every tweak helps. And so I offer these tips that I wish somebody offered me when I was first starting out.

~/.bash_login is your friend

Most of these tweaks are made in a file named .bash_login that can be found in your home directory. This file is used to set certain preferences every time a new Terminal window is loaded. This means that in order to view changes brought about by modifying .bash_login, you need to open a new Terminal window.

Since .bash_login is an invisible file, it’s easiest to open through the command line. Since I’m a TextMate guy, and I opted to install the shell command, I can open bash login using the mate ~/.bash_login command. If you don’t know how to open a file in your favorite text editor via the command line, you can use one of the built-in text editors. I’d recommend nano, which you can use by running this command: nano ~/.bash_login

So now you know how to edit your .bash_login file. Now let’s take a look at why that’s so cool.

Enable ANSI colors

A Terminal without ANSI colors is like a Documents folder without icons. Being able to easily distinguish between directories and files is something is essential to quick and easy file browsing via the command line. To enable ANSI colors, add the following lines to your .bash_login file:

  export CLICOLOR=1
  export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad

Then quit and reload a new Terminal session. Now, whenever you run the “ls” command, you ought to notice some useful coloring to help guide the way.

Customize your prompt

One thing that always bothered me about using the command line was that the prompt was always a gargantuan string that consisted of my computer name, followed by my username, followed by my working directory. It’s obnoxious when your Terminal’s command prompt takes up an entire line of its own. So I changed it to just contain my working directory and whatever user is logged in at that moment. How? Add the following line to your .bash_login:

export PS1="[\w] \u$ "

See this page for more ways to customize your prompt.

MacPorts

Free, open-source software is all around. While most Linux users have package management systems to pluck whatever they need, whenever they need it, OS X doesn’t come with one. That’s where “MacPorts”: http://www.macports.org/ comes in. MacPorts gives you the “port” command, which can be used to install open source packages with ease. There’s also another project called “Fink”: http://finkproject.org/ which promises the same as MacPorts, though I’ve found MacPorts to be easier to use.

Cheat

This one is a bit more advanced, but it’s worth it. “Cheat”: http://cheat.errtheblog.com/ has over a hundred cheat sheets about a wide variety of topics that are almost certainly interesting to any reader who has made it this far in this post. To get cheat, you first need to install Ruby and RubyGems, which shouldn’t be too difficult considering the fact that we have MacPorts on our side. The following commands will install cheat on your system:

  sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems
  sudo gem install cheat --include-dependencies

To view a list of cheat sheets, run this command:

cheat sheets

Then to view a cheat sheet, just enter “cheat” followed by whatever sheet you wish to view. So to view the cheat sheet about tar, the popular file archiving utility, you just run this command:

cheat tar

It’s worth noting that most of Cheat’s sheets are about Ruby-related topics, since it is a tool written in Ruby, by members of the Ruby community. However, anybody is free to add new cheat sheets, and the list is always expanding.

Things you should already know

• Tab completion: Whenever you press the tab key, the command prompt will try to auto-complete whatever you were typing based on the file and directory names of your current directory.
• Your PATH: Your PATH variable determines where Terminal looks for executables. If you install a piece of software to a directory that’s not contained in your PATH, you’re going to have a hard time running it. You can set your PATH in your .bash_login file.