Valhalla Island

After a short stint with iTerm I came crawling back to OS X’s lovely built-in command line, Terminal. Some applications just shouldn’t have user interface menus, Terminal is one, TextMate is another. Both are simple and highly customisable. I’m the type of person to customise anything I don’t immediately love. It was seeing the beautiful anti-aliased Monaco in TextMate that forced the change in my Terminal.

There was a time when I wasn’t using the command line enough to justify spending time creating a nice look for it but these days it’s the only way I can interact with my second computer. It’s even been promoted to the dock, which is currently hidden, but that’s a story for another day.

Here are the before and afters. Starting with before.

And after.

The type on the after really isn’t brown, I don’t know what’s happened on the resize but click through on each for the 100%.

Here’s what I did. By far the worst part of the default Terminal is the hideous type. They’ve chosen a nice font, my favourite monospaced font, but it’s strongly aliased, a sharp contrast to nearly all other fonts in OS X. In the Terminal choose the Terminal Menu → Window Settings… From there choose Display from the drop down menu and click set font. I chose to bump it up from 10 to 12 point and I also increased the height spacing to two notches above 1.0. After you’ve closed the font dialog, check the Anti-aliasing box.

You could probably stop here but I like a little colour. Under Color in the same drop down menu click the swatch next to the Use this background color label. You’re shown the system wide colour chooser. Personally, I like the crayon box, you can’t really go wrong and I’m a huge fan of the Honeydew crayon. As a finishing touch, I’ve added one notch of transparency but that can occasionally be annoying.

Be sure to click the Use Settings as Defaults button before closing or the next time you start Terminal your modifications will be gone forever.

There you go, a prettier, much more easily read Terminal.