Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Terminal Preferences

The Terminal application’s user settings control not just the application’s look and feel, but the ways you interact with your shells. This section covers important application preferences to know about.

Setting a default shell

There are two ways to set a default shell when using your system, which are suggested by the “When creating a new Terminal window” radio buttons found in Terminal’s Preferences window (Terminal → Preferences, or -,), seen in Figure 3-1.

The lazier way involves activating the “Execute this command” button and typing a shell’s path into the neighboring text field. Henceforth, whenever you open a new Terminal window, that shell will launch in place of your default login shell. This is a nice solution if you use only Terminal as a command line and never log in remotely to your machine, or if you’re not a member of the machine’s admin group and hence can’t set your login shell to something else.

Figure 3-1. The Terminal Preferences dialog

A more permanent, but less obvious, way involves changing your account’s default shell. This affects not just the shell Terminal opens by default but the shell that appears when you use a different command-line access application or log in to your machine from some other location via ssh (described in “The Secure ...