Simple Tricks to Improve the Terminal Appearance in Mac OS X
The standard terminal appearance is just boring old black text on a white background. Apple included a few nice preset themes too, but to really make your terminals appearance stand out you’ll want to take the time to customize it yourself. While some of these tweaks are admittedly pure eye candy, others genuinely improve the command line experience and make using the terminal not only more attractive but easier to scan.
Follow along and try them all, or just pick and choose which makes the most sense for you.
Modify Bash Prompt, Enable Colors, Improve ‘ls’
At a bare minimum, let’s get a better bash prompt, improve the output of the frequently used ls command, and enable colors. This is all done by editing the .bash_profile or .bashrc located in the home directory, for the purpose of this walkthrough we’ll use .bash_profile:
- Open Terminal and type nano .bash_profile
- Paste in the following lines:
- Hit Control+O to save, then Control+X to exit out of nano
export PS1="\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[m\]@\[\033[32m\]\h:\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\$ "
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad
alias ls='ls -GFh'
The first line changes the bash prompt to be colorized, and rearranges the prompt to be “username@hostname:cwd $”
The next two lines enable command line colors, and define colors for the ‘ls’ command
Finally, we alias ls to include a few flags by default. -G colorizes output, -h makes sizes human readable, and -F throws a / after a directory, * after an executable, and a @ after a symlink, making it easier to quickly identify things in directory listings.
Pasted in properly, it should look like this:
Open a new terminal window, run ls, and see the difference. Still not satisfied with the appearance, or have you already done that? There’s more to do.
Enable Bold Fonts, ANSI Colors, & Bright Colors
This will be theme and profile dependent, meaning you will have to adjust this for each theme. Most themes have ANSI color on by default, but enable it if it’s not.
- Pull down the Terminal menu and choose “Preferences”, then click the “Settings” tab
- Choose your profile/theme from the left side list, then under the “Text” tab check the boxes for “Use bold fonts” and “Use bright colors for bold text”
This makes things like directories and executables be bold and brighter, making them easier to spot in listings.
Adjust Background Opacity, Blur, & Background Image
After you have colorization squared away, adjusting the terminals background appearance is a nice touch:
- Back in Terminal Preferences, choose the theme from the left side, then go to the “Window” tab
- Click on “Color & Effects” to adjust the background color, opacity, and blur – opacity at 80% or so and blur at 100% is pleasant on the eyes
- Click on “Image” to select a background picture. Dark background pictures are better for dark themes, light for light, etc
Opacity and blur alone tend to be enough, but going the extra step to set a background picture can look either really nice or completely garish. You make the call.
Install a Theme
Another approach is to use Terminal themes like IR Black, which are simple to install, add custom colors, and make the command line much more attractive. Here are three popular themes:
You can also easily create your own by spending some time with Terminal Preferences and setting colors and fonts to what you like.
New Terminal vs Old Terminal
Put it all together, and you should have something like this:
Which is a bit more interesting to look at than this, right?
Have a useful bash prompt or some other customization tip? Let us know in the comments.
Text makes a big impact. I like Monaco as a font, anti-alias is a must, and use Command+ and Command- to change the font size on the fly depending on how much space you need.
And don’t forget to use Full Screen Terminal if you really need to focus.
Control-X does not work in Mountain Line Terminal. Also using the arrow keys did not work in the terminal window.
I had this issue but tried a Return after the Control-X and that seemed to work.
Thanks, it’s indeed better than the default one. Colors is a must for terminal users. Thank you !
In addition, there’s a nice LSCOLORS generator if you’d like to tweak.. it’s probably one of many on the ‘net:
http://geoff.greer.fm/lscolors/
Just use the ‘BSD colors’ and you’re set
Control+X does not work in my Mountain Lion? Got any other suggestions.
@John
What do you mean ? Because it does work in nano.
This is one of your own, from 3 October 2011, and a favorite of mine:
“If you want to customize the Terminals appearance a bit beyond the prompt and a custom background, you can make the Terminal much more readable by using this nice trick to add a separator and timestamp between each executed command. This also bolds the current command text and anything that is available from tab completion.”
http://osxdaily.com/2011/10/03/add-a-separator-time-stamp-between-terminal-commands-to-increase-readability/
Why not use iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh (https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh)
To change the colors in the PS1 prompt, change the text between the “\[033[" and the "m\]“. Nothing means reset to default; number means that color; number followed by “;1″ means the bright or bold version of that color.
31 – red
32 – green
33 – yellow
34 – blue
35 – magenta
36 – cyan
37 – white
For example, “\[33[34;1m\]” is bold/bright blue.
The special values (e.g. \u for the username, \h for the hostname, \w for the current working directory) are documented in the “PROMPTING” section of the bash man page.
Don’t like the actual colors displayed (e.g. blue is hard to read on a black background)? Change them in Terminal’s preferences (under Settings and the profile being used.)
The best tip is get rid of Terminal.app and use iTerm2. Anyone who uses shell professionally will tell you the same.
I use Terminal everyday professionally and wouldn’t switch to anything else for all the gold of the world…
You may prefer iTerm2, but let others have their own opinion.
I also feel no need to try iTerm2 now that Terminal.app has tabs.
Ever since I discovered the free Source Code Pro font, I’ve never used anything else for all my Terminal & plain text work.
And the colors are pretty & convenient, but I prefer to go all green-on-black. Guess I’m just pining for my old Apple II+.
@Maicon Nunes
I use Terminal everyday professionally and wouldn’t switch to anything else for all the gold of the world…
You may prefer iTerm2, but let others have their own opinion.
LOLO, do you really think the first screenshot is an improvement ? Or is the improvement visible after wearing sunglasses ?
You like monochrome? Cool. I like colors.
Here’s another nice (simpler) suggestion for the terminal: http://wozia.com/blog/tips/how-to-make-the-terminal-sexy-on-mac-os-x/
What exactly are the “command line colors” enabled by CLICOLOR?
http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/FreeBSD/man1/ls.1.html
scroll down to “LSCOLORS” for more info.
export HISTSIZE=5000
export HISTFILESIZE=5000
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTTIMEFORMAT=’%F %T > ‘
export GREP_COLOR=’1;32′
How about switching to zsh?
how to revert to the original ?
Thanks for this article and useful comments! I put these into my ~/.profile – why would I use ~/.bash_profile instead?
export PS1=”\[33[36m\]\u\[33[m\]@\[33[32m\]\h:\[33[33;1m\]\w\[33[m\]\$ ”
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad
alias ls=ls\ -AFGhl
export HISTIGNORE=”$HISTIGNORE:fortune:history”
export HISTCONTROL=”ignoredups”
export HISTTIMEFORMAT=”%F %T > ”
export GREP_OPTIONS=”–color=auto”
export GREP_COLOR=”1;32″
I pasted in the color settings just as described in this article, and now every time I log in I see this:
-bash: alias: -: not found
-bash: alias: See: not found
-bash: alias: more: not found
-bash: alias: at:: not found
-bash: alias: http://osxdaily.com/2013/02/05/improve-terminal-appearance-mac-os-x/#sthash.tKyckXI0.dpuf: not found
Any ideas how I can get rid of this?