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January 28, 2007

tips

Splash a little color into your Terminal session

Posted Jan. 28, ’07, 8:01 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

Terminal colorsThough I bill myself as a Terminal superfreak, every now and then I run across little tips that I had no idea existed. Granted, the tidbit in question today is about the OS X application Terminal, rather than OS X’s underlying command line, but it’s still pretty nifty. And, as it so often does, the secret knowledge stems from Mac OS X Hints’s own Rob “Drag and Drop” Griffiths (admit it; that’s a frightening nickname).

The standard OS X Terminal window is a bit bland: black text on a white background. True command-line geeks prefer something a little more retro; I opt for glowing green text on a black background, but white on black is more than acceptable. Now, you can change a Terminal window’s colors by going to Terminal -> Window Settings -> Color and click on the appropriate swatch or you can use the mighty, magnificent powers of OS X to perform the same task in a slightly more Mac-like way.

Go to Font -> Show Colors and you’ll get OS X’s color picker. Now grab any swatch (next to the magnifying glass icon) and drag and drop it onto the part of the window you want to change. You have four such options: the background, the foreground text, bold text, and the cursor. Immediately, every type of text in that Terminal window will change color. Note that this will only change the colors of the current window; to make it the default, you’ll need to open Terminal -> Window Settings -> Color and click the “Use Settings as Defaults” button.


2 Comments

Kuswanto said:

Nice.. :)
Make terminal less boring.

January 28, 2007 8:41 AM
speedo said:

I thought that was obvious :S although the first thing I did was goto the window settings when I launched my first terminal on a mac 2 Septembers ago.

What constitutes a terminal superfreak might I ask?

January 29, 2007 8:50 PM

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