22Jul/1115
OS X Lion – Terminal Colours
Having recently I upgraded my Mac to OS X Lion the first thing I noticed was my terminal’s color theme was no longer working properly! Prior to upgrading I was using a combination of Visor (now replaced by TotalTerminal), SIMBL, and TerminalColors along with the IR_Black theme posted by Todd Werth as detailed in his blog entry A black OS X Leopard Terminal theme that is actually readable. As the method to solve my problem took a bit of searching and trial and error I am posting the process I went through in hopes of helping others whom may stumble upon this post.
Continue reading for more information…
Steps taken:
1) Since I previously had Visor installed, I made the switch to TotalTerminal by uninstalling SIMBL (this also removes any plugins such as TerminalColors). Easiest way to accomplish this is to head over to the SIMBL site, download the lastest release, and run the uninstaller it comes with.
2) Install TotalTerminal.
3) A modified version of the IR_Black.terminal theme file has been provided below. I have also posted a copy to Gist on Github here. Create a new file ending with the.terminal extension containing the modified code.
4) Open your terminal and head over to Terminal -> Preferences -> Text tab. TotalTerminal uses the Visor theme when it loads up. Remove the existing Visor theme, import the newly created file from step 3, and rename it to Visor.
5) Quit and restart TotalTerminal and your new color theme should load.
Modified IR_Black.terminal theme file:
001 002 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>003 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">004 <plist version="1.0">005 <dict>006 007 <data>008 009 010 011 012 013 014 </data>015 016 <data>017 018 019 020 021 022 023 </data>024 025 <data>026 027 028 029 030 031 032 </data>033 034 <data>035 036 037 038 039 040 041 </data>042 043 <data>044 045 046 047 048 049 050 </data>051 052 <data>053 054 055 056 057 058 059 </data>060 061 <data>062 063 064 065 066 067 068 </data>069 070 <data>071 072 073 074 075 076 </data>077 078 <data>079 080 081 082 083 084 </data>085 086 <data>087 088 089 090 091 092 093 </data>094 095 <data>096 097 098 099 100 101 102 </data>103 104 <data>105 106 107 108 109 110 111 </data>112 113 <data>114 115 116 117 118 119 120 </data>121 122 <data>123 124 125 126 127 128 129 </data>130 131 <data>132 133 134 135 136 137 </data>138 139 140 141 <data>142 143 144 145 146 147 </data>148 149 <data>150 151 152 153 154 155 </data>156 157 <data>158 159 160 161 162 163 164 </data>165 166 <true/>167 168 169 170 171 172 <data>173 174 175 176 177 178 179 </data>180 181 <false/>182 183 <data>184 185 186 187 188 189 </data>190 191 <data>192 193 194 195 196 197 198 </data>199 200 201 202 203 204 205 </dict>206 </plist>207
July 23rd, 2011 - 19:49
Thanks for the theme! Cheers.
August 2nd, 2011 - 12:56
Nice! Thanks for posting this. IR Black was looking sad, but now it’s back to normal.
August 10th, 2011 - 03:14
Thanks!
Do you have a link to the dark wood background displayed in your screenshot? Also did you have to set variables for CLICOLOR and LSCOLORS? If so what did you set them to. I loaded this theme however all term colors were displayed black/white, even after changing xterm-256color to xterm-color.
February 16th, 2012 - 10:51
export CLICOLOR=1 hopefully helps you there
My background image can be found here or other variants of it by Googling something along the lines of “Black Wood Background”
August 12th, 2011 - 19:40
Thanks for this post. Really enjoying Total Terminal. One question though, whats the weather/calendar desktop widget from?
February 16th, 2012 - 10:28
Glad you like it
I use Geek Tool plus a series of shell scripts to put the calendar / weather widgets on my desktop. I haven’t posted much on my blog lately but this is definitely a good idea for my next article.
August 17th, 2011 - 14:14
Thanks for taking the time to figure out /and/ document this – you saved me a ton of time. My eyes thank you too – the Terminal defaults are terrible, and after the upgrade to Lion I thought I was going to be in trouble.
August 26th, 2011 - 13:57
Fantastic. Thanks for this.
September 16th, 2011 - 15:30
Thanks for the tutorial, but the modified .terminal isn’t working. I can’t import… Can you please take a look at it? However, i did import the old theme and it worked, but when i execute “ls”, i get no colours at all…
What is wrong?
September 21st, 2011 - 13:17
When I download the modified theme/copy your code into a .terminal file, my OS tells me “The file is corrupt. You may be able to obtain a fresh copy of the file from its author.”
October 31st, 2011 - 04:03
This is so helpful! I finally get my terminal theme back!
Thanks a lot!
December 14th, 2011 - 00:59
Very useful, thank you! Tip: make sure your .terminal is valid XML and you don’t include the text comment that comes with the gist. Otherwise you won’t have a valid file, and you won’t be able to load the theme.
February 16th, 2012 - 10:45
Thanks Levy!
I just noticed there were a few comments about the file being corrupt. It seems the code block I pasted above was missing some of the xml markup that is in the Gist version. I corrected this and both should work now (keeping in mind one must remove the comments from the Gist version).
January 6th, 2012 - 18:20
When i try insert the into any file .terminal, the Terminal.app says the file is corrupt!!!
So?
February 16th, 2012 - 11:13
See Levy’s comment above