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Is there some way to make the Terminal app more readable?

posted by may on July 15th, 2009  

I’ve pinged a bunch of people about this but there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution. I’d love it if the Terminal app went from looking like this

terminal01

To something like this…

terminal02

Just a few font changes…it seem like a simple request, but alas, it’s not. Surely I can’t be the only one who wants this?

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5 Responses to “Is there some way to make the Terminal app more readable?”

  1. rajbot
    July 16th, 2009 | 10:23 pm

    Using a non-monospaced font for terminal would give most programmers a headache, I think.

    Here is a tip that I snarfed from tracey: you can add a separator line above your command prompt. Helps keep things nice and tidy:

    PS1=\e[4m____________________________________________________________________________\e[m\n     \@ \u@\h.us  \e[1m \w \e[m\n>
  2. may
    July 17th, 2009 | 6:25 am

    thanks for the tip! why are non-monospaced fonts bad?

    anyways i think the option to control how text is displayed should be an option for people like me who are not programmers but still need to use the command line for checking stuff in / out, merging files, starting up rails, etc cause it gives me a horrible headache to look at undifferentiated text :-( a guy from apple told me it wasn’t possible without some hackery…

    my friend kathryn showed me a roundabout way to make my command prompt pink which makes me a little happier :-) So now it looks like this

    terminal03

    I had to enter the following line in .bash_profile in my home directory

    export PS1=”\[\033[3;35m\]\u@\h \w \[\033[0m\]\a”

  3. rajbot
    July 28th, 2009 | 2:46 pm

    non-monospace fonts are bad for programmers because it makes it hard to line things up throughout your source code.

    var raj = 0x123 | 0x456;
var may = 0x567 & 0x789;

    vs

    var raj = 0×123 | 0×456;
    var may = 0×567 & 0×789;

  4. rajbot
    July 28th, 2009 | 3:03 pm

    Also, have you figured out your font issue?

    In Terminal.app, go to Preferences->Settings->Font, click ‘Change…’, and choose any font/size you want.. Even Ed!

  5. may
    July 28th, 2009 | 4:45 pm

    thanks! I did figure out how to change the fonts / sizes but it did something weird to all my non-monospaced fonts so I’m just using HelveticaMono :-( I guess I use Terminal for different reasons than most.

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