Spending a lot of time in various ssh sessions?
A bit tired of trying to remember which tab is on which server with the default os x terminal ?
So was I. Hunting around, I saw various hacks (e.g. a , or ) to achieve this but also an app called .
Its free and within 30mins I was pretty much back to my previous terminal existence but with the names of my servers and my username in the tabs titles.
Awesome.
Some things I learned:
1) Some of the preferences I had to hunt for:
Not everything is available from iTerm–>Preferences. There are a couple of menu options of interest (this is iTerm 0.9.6).
View–>Show Session Info …
This lets you change the colors and fonts, etc for your terminal window and also update the default.
Bookmarks –> Manage Profiles …
This is where you can set a lot more options about your session, including making the cursor blink (Something for some reason I found essential:)
The reason they are here is because they are associated with bookmarks, a powerful feature that for example allows you to bookmark an ssh session, and have a whole set of preferences associated with that session.
I would like to see them all aggregated under the “Preferences” option though, because as a os x user, thats where I expect to find everything that I can configure (Posted as an .
2) I wanted the title to change whenever I change directory. Simple, just need the following in my ~/.bash_profile (see for differences between ~/.bashrc:
export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}: ${PWD/#$HOME/~}\007"'
3) This one is not probably very “good form”, but I really like the icon for the os x terminal window. So simply “Show Package Contents” on the iTerm.app and swap out /Contents/Resources/iTerm.icns with the equivalent in the Terminal application Terminal.icns
4) I also wanted a “close x” icon on each tab, and discovered that this is under Preferences –> Tab –> Use compact tab labels. You want to UN check this.
I now have exactly the same user experience as before with some great bonuses, for example, a cool feature is the “blur” of the transparency behind the window.
Subscribe