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TerminalColors-0.2.1.tbz (Universal Binary)

TerminalColors-0.2.tbz (Panther/Tiger)
TerminalColors-0.1.dmg (Jaguar)

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Enjoy TerminalColors?

The default blue and red colors in the Terminal.app are nearly invisible on a CRT.
HexEdit the hard-coded color values in the binary...
Better Solution:
Add an ANSI color picker to the application.

1. What It Does

TerminalColors is a SIMBL plugin that patches Apple's Terminal.app to add a color picker to allow the user to edit the ANSI colors.

Basically, a new inspector pane is added which enables you to select colors for all the individual ANSI colors. Why is this useful? The default blue and red colors used by the Terminal.app are nearly invisible to the human eye on a non-LCD screen. At that point, it seemed only right to provide functionality to cater to the potential whims regarding the other colors in the palette.

1.1 TerminalColours for Leopards

I stopped working on TerminalColors many years ago. However, a new version for Leopard/Snow Leopard is available. Unfortunately, it's called TerminalColours, which causes no end of confusion. You can read more about it here.

2. Installing


Wonder upon wonder, this version is actually packaged! Just double click and everything goes to the right places. Step 5 is still relevent... ;-)

Previous Releases

  1. Download SIMBL and install it
  2. Download TerminalColors and expand the bundle
  3. Drag TerminalColors.bundle into ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins
  4. Restart Terminal.app
  5. Send $10 donation

3. How To

  1. Launch the Terminal.app
  2. Select Terminal -> Window Settings... in the menu bar.
  3. The inspector window will have a popup button, contain an item ANSI Colors - if it doesn't, then there has been an error loading the plugin. Selecting this will show the color picking areas with the current colors displayed.
  4. Once changes are made using the color pickers, the Apply button must be used to actually set the colors.
    • Apply only affects the current session. Clicking Use Settings as Defaults or saving this session setup will properly retain your color settings.

4. Caveats

  1. Apple will probably just fix this in their next release and render all of my efforts totally obsolete. (17 patches later, and now fix yet - maybe I'm in the clear...)

5. Questions | Comments | Feedback


You can always read about my current projects in my development journal.

6. Revision History

v0.2.1 - released 2006-03-10

v0.2 - released 2004-01-25

v0.1 - released 2003-06-25