I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal
Apple has been slowly winning over a lot of traditional Unix and Linux converts. This new breed of switcher is after a cool shell environment. In Leopard, Apple has upgraded Terminal.app to provide a whole slew of new features that are sure to continue winning new converts. Let’s just take a look at a few of them:
Secure Keyboard Entry – Prevent other applications from detecting keystrokes used in terminal. Enable this using the Terminal menu.
Tabbed Interface – I always have 3 shell windows open. That’s how I roll. But with the new tabbed interface (which you can access using the Command-T keystroke) I find that I’m using two shell windows with 3 tabs each. This gives me the ability to have a man page or process list on one side of my screen while being able to run other commands on the other side. You can fire up 2 shell windows and then open as many tabs as you like.
Export Settings – This isn’t new in Leopard, but what is new in Leopard is that the tabs get exported along with window positions, layouts, themes and backgrounds.
Themes – Glass, Homebrew, Novel, Red Sands – these themes allow you to use prebuilt templates for how you view your shell. These include background, text color, transparency. Can you imagine Steve sitting in his office at Apple dinking around with the Homebrew theme?
Window Groups – A group of windows with a saved location, tabbed layout, shell configuration and settings.
Terminal Inspector – Switch themes on the fly, view running process and increase the columns and rows of a shell environment.
Titles – Set titles for your terminal windows so you can remember what was where.
