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July 2, 2006

tips

Put your Visor down and hack Terminal to run silent, run deep

Posted Jul. 2, ’06, 8:59 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

VisorI really like the free extension Visor, by Alcor, the developer of Quicksilver. It allows you to have a transparent sheet containing a Terminal prompt drop over the top half of your screen, as in games like Quake. But one of the program’s shortcomings is that it requires Terminal to be running. I always forget to open Terminal first, and when I open it, a Terminal window pops up anyways, rendering Visor kind of redundant. I could set Terminal to start on login, but what I really wanted was for it to run like a background app.

While chatting with a friend about it last night, I realized that it was probably possible to get around the problem. Dashboard, after all, can be removed from the dock and continue to funhttp://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-51673.htmlction normally, therefore it must be possible. A little Googling turned up this post on the Mac OS X Hints forum about hiding active apps, so I quickly adapted it to my usage. Read on for the details.

First things first, make a copy of the Terminal.app package in your /Applications/Utilities.

When that’s done, open up the copy of the application. Make any changes you want to the application’s appearance now (change the text color, for example). It will be more difficult to do this later. To make the Terminal window disappear almost immediately, I went to the Terminal preferences and selected the “Execute this command (specify complete path):” option. In the text field below I entered clear. When you’ve made all the adjustments you want, close the copy of Terminal.

Then, right click on the Terminal.app copy and choose “Show Package Contents.” A new window will open with a folder called “Contents.” Inside that, you’ll see the file you want: Info.plist. To edit this correctly, you’ll either need the Property List Editor app installed with Apple’s Developer Tools, or another application (I used a free trial of PlistEdit Pro). Open Info.plist with the editor; you’ll see a list of names and values. Add a new child, and for the name enter LSUIElement. Make sure the class is set to “string,” and then enter 1 for the value. Save Info.plist and quit the editor.

Now, open up the Accounts preference pane and choose Login Items for your account. Add one by clicking the “Plus” button and select the copy of Terminal you made. Log out and log in again, and voila; you should see Visor’s icon in your menubar, but no hint of Terminal’s existence. It doesn’t show up in the dock, nor can you switch to it via Command-Tab.

Should you ever want to get rid of it, simply remove the application from your Login Items, and delete the copy. Simple. If anybody finds a better way to make the Terminal window not show up briefly at launch, I’d be interested to know. My solution is kind of a hack, but it works well enough. Hopefully they’ll come out with a standalone version of Visor, and this’ll all be moot.


5 Comments

Greg said:

Why hack it when you can place an AppleScript that can do the same thing?

tell application "Terminal"
activate
close window 1
end tell

Save and make it a startup item.

July 2, 2006 1:21 PM
Dan--the man said:

Sorry if this is a dumb question:

What does all this do that Command + H wouldn't do? Does it use less CPU or RAM?

July 3, 2006 8:40 AM
Dan Author Profile Page said:

It's more or a less an aesthetic hack, I admit. The difference is that the altered copy of Terminal won't show up in the dock, or in the Command-Tab application switcher as a hidden application would.

July 3, 2006 8:53 AM
gt said:

Sorry for the newb question. But how do I adjust the visor window transparency?

I've got the little visor icon up next to clock and can select the prefrences but nothing about transparency is there. I've seen it mentioned as being possible.

Did a little googling couldn't find any solution.

July 3, 2006 9:28 AM
Dan Author Profile Page said:

Hey gt. It's a little non-intuitive, so don't worry about asking. :) The trick is to set the Window Settings in Terminal (under the Terminal menu). Go to Color in the drop down menu; at the bottom there's a Transparency option. Make sure you click "Use Settings as Default" at the bottom. Visor will inherit the settings of your Terminal windows. Same goes for font, font color, etc.

July 3, 2006 9:50 AM

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