Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Window Administration

The Terminal has some tricks up its sleeve to make your time at the command line a little less black-and-white, a little more productive, and even a little more fun.

Changing Window and Font Colors

If you ever find yourself hemming and hawing about how boring your life is, this next tip is a surefire remedy. With just a few mouse clicks, you can change the window and font colors in Terminal. All you have → to do is choose Terminal → > Window Settings, then in the pop-up menu at the top of the dialog box, select Color. Now just change the settings to the colors you want. Presto! Your life is beaming with new color.

The above method is your only choice if you want to change the color of selected text. For changing all other color settings, however, Terminal provides another method.

First, make sure you can see normal text, bold text, some of the screen background, and the Terminal cursor, all at once in your Terminal window. The easiest way to see everything in one window is to view the manual pages for a program—for example, man bash.

UP TO SPEED Editing Environment Variable Files

Many of the hints in this chapter and the next direct you to modify one of the key shell setup files described in the sidebar on Sidebar 15.3. The .bash_profile setup file, for example, is often used for shell settings. However, it’s important to know how to modify such files, since editing mistakes could cause your shell to behave erratically.

Mac OS X’s Unix side comes with three different ...