Make your Leopard Terminal (and VIM) shine with SIMBL, TerminalColors, and the IR_black theme.
One thing that always bothered the crap out of me about OS X was their implementation of 'Terminal'. Staring at a black box with only white text is quite unnerving. I'm not sure how their seemingly graphically-anal designers at Apple could handle it. Anyways, there's fortunately an easy solution to this ginormous problem.
There's an excellent tutorial that runs through the process of customizing just about everything with Terminal, but I'm going to get right to the point with as little extra stuff as possible.
The very first thing we need to do is actually enable colors in our Terminal. Pop open Terminal. You should automatically be at your home directory to start, but if you're not, just:
cd ~
Now we need to create a file titled '.bash_profile'. This file gets loaded every time you open a new Terminal session. Create a new file with VIM like so:
vim .bash_profile
and enter the following:
source ~/.bashrc
Save the file with ':wq'. Essentially, all this says is 'load a file called .bashrc'. Each user can have a .bashrc file. Create your .bashrc file:
vim .bashrc
and enter the following:
export TERM=xterm-color export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto' GREP_COLOR='1;32' export CLICOLOR=1 alias ls='ls -G' export COLOR_NC='\e[0m' # No Color export COLOR_WHITE='\e[1;37m' export COLOR_BLACK='\e[0;30m' export COLOR_BLUE='\e[0;34m' export COLOR_LIGHT_BLUE='\e[1;34m' export COLOR_GREEN='\e[0;32m' export COLOR_LIGHT_GREEN='\e[1;32m' export COLOR_CYAN='\e[0;36m' export COLOR_LIGHT_CYAN='\e[1;36m' export COLOR_RED='\e[0;31m' export COLOR_LIGHT_RED='\e[1;31m' export COLOR_PURPLE='\e[0;35m' export COLOR_LIGHT_PURPLE='\e[1;35m' export COLOR_BROWN='\e[0;33m' export COLOR_YELLOW='\e[1;33m' export COLOR_GRAY='\e[1;30m' export COLOR_LIGHT_GRAY='\e[0;37m' alias colorslist="set | egrep 'COLOR_\w*'"
The above is what enables the colors for your terminal. Save the file.
You could now quit terminal, and start a new session, and you should have colors. The default colors aren't so nice, though. Luckily, a few quick plugins will allow us to customize the colors. Ciarán Walsh runs through these steps, or you an follow along below.
First, install SIMBL. Second, download Ciarán's SIMBL plugin. You can now quit terminal, restart, and you'll see a 'More' button in Terminal settings allowing you to customize your colors.
I personally use InfiniteRed's theme here.
So now everything is beautiful, except for VIM. I use VIM quite a bit throughout my day, so this is important for me. Luckily, there's a simple fix for this as well. Navigate to your home directory, and create the file '.vimrc', and enter the following code (or grab it from here):
" This .vimrc file should be placed in your home directory " The Terminal app supports (at least) 16 colors " So you can have the eight dark colors and the eight light colors " the plain colors, using these settings, are the same as the light ones " NOTE: You will need to replace ^[ with a raw Escape character, which you " can type by typing Ctrl-V and then (after releaseing Ctrl-V) the Escape key. if has("terminfo") set t_Co=16 set t_AB=[%?%p1%{8}%<%t%p1%{40}%+%e%p1%{92}%+%;%dm set t_AF=[%?%p1%{8}%<%t%p1%{30}%+%e%p1%{82}%+%;%dm else set t_Co=16 set t_Sf=[3%dm set t_Sb=[4%dm endif syntax on " Everything from here on down is optional " These colors are examples of what is possible " type :help syntax " or :help color within vim for more info " and try opening the file " share/vim/vim61/syntax/colortest.vim " Note: where share is depends on where/how you installed vim highlight Comment ctermfg=DarkGreen highlight Constant ctermfg=DarkMagenta highlight Character ctermfg=DarkRed highlight Special ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight Identifier ctermfg=DarkCyan highlight Statement ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight PreProc ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight Type ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight Number ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight Delimiter ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight Error ctermfg=Black highlight Todo ctermfg=DarkBlue highlight WarningMsg term=NONE ctermfg=Black ctermbg=NONE highlight ErrorMsg term=NONE ctermfg=DarkRed ctermbg=NONE " These settings only affect the X11 GUI version (which is different " than the fully Carbonized version at homepage.mac.com/fisherbb/ highlight Comment guifg=Green gui=NONE highlight Constant guifg=Magenta gui=NONE highlight Character guifg=Red gui=NONE highlight Special guifg=Blue gui=NONE highlight Identifier guifg=DarkCyan gui=NONE highlight Statement guifg=DarkGreen gui=NONE highlight PreProc guifg=Purple gui=NONE highlight Type guifg=DarkGreen gui=NONE "highlight Normal guibg=#E0F2FF gui=NONE highlight Number guifg=Blue gui=NONE "highlight Cursor guifg=NONE guibg=Green "highlight Cursor guifg=bg guibg=fg highlight Delimiter guifg=blue gui=NONE "highlight NonText guibg=lightgray gui=NONE "highlight Error guifg=White guibg=Red gui=NONE highlight Error guifg=NONE guibg=NONE gui=NONE highlight Todo guifg=Blue guibg=Yellow gui=NONE "#### end color settings #############
That should take care of it. Enjoy!
5 Comments
You might consider some code coloring on your blog posts. Don't you have the Geshi goodness yet?
As someone who's OK with defaulting to the pro shell in terminal, I'm wondering what's the best part of doing this?
Freaking spammers.
So - best part about colors in Terminal:
Files of different permissions, protected files, linked files, directories, etc, are all color-coded, to allow for quick and easy identification of security levels and states of files and directories.
Also, VIM is quite unreadable without colors.
you're a spammer.
Thanks for posting this! I just spent a good hour or so configuring Aquamacs because of the incomplete info I found online, but thanks to you I didn't have to do the same for the Terminal.
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