Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Terminal Preferences

If you spend endless hours staring at the Terminal screen, as most Unix junkies do, you’ll eventually be grateful for the preference settings that let you control how Terminal looks and acts. In fact, Terminal lets you manage your preferences in an ingenious way.

Instead of having a single set of options saved (as with other applications), Terminal manages your options as named settings groups, allowing you to quickly apply different settings to different windows at any time using the Inspector window (Shell→Show Inspector).

You can also save the layout of entire groups of windows, each with their own settings in effect, into a single configuration, allowing you to recreate those layouts in an instant.

Configure your settings using Terminal’s Preferences panel (Figure 16-8), which you get to by choosing Terminal→Preferences (of all places).

Startup

The Startup tab lets you configure what Settings or Window group Terminal should use to open (in case you want something besides the factory settings). This tab also gives you another way to switch from bash to a different default shell. (Where it says “Shells open with,” choose “command (complete path)” and then type /bin/bash for bash, or /bin/tcsh for tcsh. New Terminal windows will then open with that shell.)

Using two other pairs of pop-up menus, one for new windows and the other for new tabs, you can answer two questions. First: Do you want new windows or tabs to open with the same settings as the current active one—or ...