Some tweaks to my OS X shell (Terminal.app) that I've found useful.
I'm using the Solarized Color Theme:
- In
Terminal
> Preferences, choose to open new windows with the Solarized Dark. - The theme Profile > Text section has
Use Bold Fonts
checked. - Under the Window section, I prefer to check the
Working Directory or Document
andPath
options, so the terminal window title is the the current directory. - Under the Shell section, select When the Shell Exits,
Close the shell if exited cleanly
.
In my logged in users' home directory, .bash_profile
contains:
export CLICOLOR=1
export PS1="\[\e[36m\]\w\[\e[0m\]$ "
alias ll='ls -GFhl' dir='ls -GFhl'
alias start=open
printf "\033]0;`date "+%a %d %b %Y %I:%M %p"`\007"
alias title='printf "\033]0;%s\007"'
- Line 1: Enable colors for
ls
(without requiring the argument -G) - Line 2: Set the Shell prompt to show the current directory in cyan. I really don't need to know my user and hostname.
- Line 3: To save me from slips,
ll
anddir
will show the long file listing. The former is a hangover from my UNIX days, while the latter is from Windows. - Line 4: When entered as
start .
(i.e.open .
) opens Finder to the current directory à la Windows (I've got loads more of these Windows-like in my profile). - Line 5: Set the Terminal title to the date and time it was started.
- Line 6: An alias to change the title, again just like DOS! Useful to quickly distinguish between Terminal windows.
And finally, to allow keyboard entry while hovering over Terminal (without setting focus first and even when the Terminal is partially obscured), i.e. "focus follows mouse":
defaults write com.apple.terminal FocusFollowsMouse -bool true
You need to re-start Terminal by Quitting it before it takes effect!
Edited 28 April: Corrected the PS1 prompt color
Updated 20 June: Recently stumbled upon an old tip from Xensoft to speed up opening a new terminal window/tab.
Normally, terminal will display the last login time, which requires a scan though the Apple System Log. To disable this, create a file .hushlogin
in your user directory, e.g.
cd
touch .hushlogin