Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal
I upgraded to Leopard a couple of days ago, and was reminded how hard it is to read the default blue colour in Terminal on a black background. Mike Solomon’s TerminalColors was written for Tiger’s Terminal and so doesn’t work with Leopard, so here is my SIMBL hack for Leopard’s Terminal – it allows customisation of ANSI colours on a per-profile basis
Make sure you have SIMBL installed – follow Allan’s instructions for Input Manager support on Leopard
Extract to
~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/PluginsRestart Terminal and click the
More…button in the Text tab of Settings
176 Responses to “Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal”

THANKS! I almost made the switch back to iTerm
But the colors doesn’t seem to be saved when I quit Terminal.
It looks like the saving might not be working for the built-in themes – it certainly works for my custom one though. Try duplicating the theme you are using and changing the colours, then setting that to the default.
I’ll look into the saving problem.
Yes!! Thanks so much for this. This is an incredible lifeserver for someone who spends most of their day in Terminal and gets so frustrated by that unreadable dark blue.
After I installed this, I started getting a popup that TerminalColors (the old one) was untested with Terminal and was disabled. This new version was still enabled and worked but the popup was annoying. Simply deleting the old package took away the popup; for me it was located in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/TerminalColors.bundle
Thanks again! Much appreciated.
THANK YOU!
i was forced back to xterm for a while… i feel dirty… but now all is good again! thank you so much for this. All must know of the success.
Thanks, that was superb!
You are my hero. Apple owes you a beer. Why can’t those clowns see how necessary this is???
Thank you so much for making this happen, I was waiting on culater.net to make this work, but you beat him out
Thanks again!
Brilliant Work! This was the number one annoyance on OSX 10.5 until moments ago!
Let me just echo everyone else… thank you very much. This was a major annoyance for me as well… one of the few things that almost made me regret upgrading to Leopard so early.
Sweet baby jesus and the orphans thank you.
[...] which would make the image showing through behind terminal windows blurred – here it is. See this post for installation [...]
Would you consider releasing the source, so those of us who don’t want to bother with SIMBL can still look into getting this fix somehow?
Also, confirming that the colors are saved only on a completely new theme; creating a theme with “Duplicate Settings” does not preserve these color settings after Terminal is quit.
Thanks so much for writing this.
To set the ANSI colors to the terminal, I just added two commands to my Settings. In the ‘shell’ tab, just add the following LSCOLORS settings to the ‘Startup’:
export CLICOLOR=1;export LSCOLORS=cxfxexexDxexexDxDxcxcx;clear;
(the colors codes are found in manpage for ls: ‘man ls’).
This doesn’t seem to affect any of the Bright color settings. I’ve set them all, and none are changing in the terminal
Sorry I was a bit negative… I just really want this to work, as I spend a good portion of my day inside terminals, and I haven’t yet found an application for the Mac that provides the customization I’m used to.
This TerminalColors hack is incredibly useful, and I’d love to see it work perfectly.
Steps to reproduce:
The ‘use bright colors’ checkbox appears to add a certain hex value to the normal color values, rather than using anything from the ‘Bright’ column of colors, since the bright colors change when you change the basic color.
@ruthven: This hack allows you to configure those colours, e.g. in
man lsyou can see that an “a” inLSCOLORSspecifies red – using this hack you can configure the red colour.@Trance: If I uncheck “Use bold fonts” and check “Use bright colors for bold text” then the terminal uses the colour specified on the right, byt the well labeled “Bold Text”. I am not really sure what these options should be configuring so I can’t say what the expected behaviour should be here…
@Ben: How exactly would you go about loading this into Terminal without SIMBL?
Thanks for responding so quickly. It took me a while to figure out how to phrase things correctly, so I decided to provide a screenshot:
http://img401.imageshack.us/done.php?l=img401/1807/terminalcolorscg9.gif
The lower right hand portion of the screenshot shows the text from an ansi-enabled application I’m using in the terminal. I’d like for the ‘bright’ (ansi bold code) to show up using the custom colors selected in the ‘bright’ column of the terminal hack. I can’t find anywhere that the actual ‘Bold Text’ color shows up – as far as I know, with this configuration and this application, it’s unused.
Trance: And what is this ANSI-enabled application?
TinTin++
http://tintin.sourceforge.net/
[...] mentioned on Ciarán Walsh’s Blog, the default blue background that’s being used for Leopard’s terminal is difficult to [...]
After about a week and a half of squinting just to be able to read source-code comments, this little gem of your popped up on my radar and has been a blessing. Like some others, the new Terminal.app was making me sort-of regret the move to Leopard, but I was unwilling to revert to Tiger given all of the positive aspects of the new OS. Now we’re back in the green thanks to Ciarán. I knew that someone was going to step up to the plate on this, whether it be Mike Solomon or someone else.
Ciarán, thank you a lot. You’ve saved the eyesight of thousands of command-line jockeys worldwide.
Michael
By the way, SIMBL is correctly installed (I have Visor working, for example) — I just can’t seem to get any colour to appear in the Terminal window without resorting to ls -G.
Trance: I took a look at TinTin++ but I don’t know what I need to do to observe the issue – could you please provide me with minimal steps to reproduce so I can take a look.
Neil: I am not really sure what problem you are having, please explain what you expect to happen and what is actually happening.
[...] in the current window instead. I completely forgot to post it, but you can now download it here. See here for how to [...]
For example, you can see the same in GNU ls (ls –color=auto). The color seems to be not affected by bright color settings.
Thanks for looking into it!
To create the example in my screenshot with TT++, I input the following command after loading it up in the terminal:
The first #show command displays all the colors in dim (regular) format, and the second #show displays them in bold (bright). No matter what you change the bright colors to using TerminalColors, even if it’s changing Yellow to Magenta, it will still display as a more ‘washed out’ version of the non-bright color.
As K said, this will show up in any use of ansi bold colors in the terminal, not limited to TT++.
Possibly this script on the tt++ website works for the leopard terminal?
http://tintin.sourceforge.net/scripts/colorutils.php
The script doesn’t work, since it still uses the standard ansi color codes for the output. It’s a problem with the terminal application itself. As I said, this happens even with non-tt++ programs. TT++ was just an easy way of testing it.
Anyways, I gave up on Terminal.app since I figured out how to set the colors in X11.app/xterm (and changing bright colors works!). Now if only they would fix copy/paste…
Trance is right, there is still a disconnect here after customizing the colors.
The reason most of you aren’t noticing it is your “bright color” is simply the same hue with larger value.
To see the issue, set your “bright color” for some color to something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. For example, make the red “bright color” green. You can play around with the other checkboxes and see that there is no way to make “bright red” look green.. it always just looks like a brighter red. The whole “bright colours” column is being ignored.
Why does this matter? Old Linux ANSI terminals (and probably many others, for all I know) display some colors substantially different in the bright version. In MUDs, for example, the “dark yellow” color was actually brown, and was used for brown things (everything leather, for example, was colored “dark yellow”). Yellow was yellow.
Similarly, “dark red” was red, but “bright red” was more pinkish.
Purists like me think this matters, a lot. Also, it doesn’t make much sense to have a “bright colours” column you can fiddle around with if it doesn’t actually do anything.
Other than that, this SIMBL plugin rocks.
BTW, it looks like the “bright colours” checkbox in Leopard actually means “increase value and reduce saturation”. That’s all it does, it doesn’t look up the “bright colour” value from the plugin.
And because it reduces saturation, the magenta looks like crap.
Thank you very much. I can see, I can see!
Many thanks for this, very much appreciated. Wonder if it might be worth telling Mike Solomon about this so his site could link here.
You are a legend Ciaran, thanks so much.
It doesn’t save the colors for me still… even if I make a brand new theme. Any ideas?
[...] (Settings), you can’t change the colors. Ciarán Walsh provides a great solution to this on his blog, which uses the also great [...]
[...] to call, beg, brib, and whatever it takes to Apple. Until then there is a popular hack for this here. But be sure to follow the instructions here first. I did have any success getting it [...]
I’m running a newly installed copy of 10.5.1 (archive and install) on an Intel iMac. I’ve installed SIMBL and the plugin as instructed. Every time I start Terminal, I get a dialog box with this message:
Terminal 2.0 (v237) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColors 0.2.1 (v5). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer (not the SIMBL author) for further information.
Any advice as to how to get around this will be greatly appreciated.
Never mind. Version 0.2.1 is an older version. The problem has been fixed.
I’m also having problem saving even if I create a completely new theme.
Saving (kw: save) the colors requires the following steps:
Note that once Terminal is closed any changes to the colors will be lost.
For clarity change that last line from - Note that once Terminal is closed any changes to the colors will be lost.
TO
Hey mates, great tool. However, I am still getting the SIMBL Error warning requester each time I start Terminal.app for the first time. It states: “Terminal 2.0(v237) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColors 0.2.1 (v5). As a precaution it has not been loaded…”. I can however set the colors correctly (as explained in the comments here). But the requester is quite annoying. Does anyone know how to get rid of it? I can also not find any newer version of TerminalColors that is known to work with the latest version of Terminal.app v237
Ups. sorry guys. But I guess I did the same mistake than Jim Reese. I had the older 0.2.1 in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL and installed the new one to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL. Now that I have only the latest one from here installed everything works as expected. thanks.
I cannot get the More.. button to show up. I believe I am doing everything correctly – single InputManagers location in /Library/, permissions set correctly, etc.
Could it be that my mac is 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo/10.5.1 (mac mini)? As far as I understand that has some 64bit extensions and from Alan’s page InputManagers cannot be loaded by any 64 bit process (number 7).
Anybody has been successfull on such configuration?
Thanks alot
Hi,
I just updated to the new Leopard 10.5.2 update. Unfortunately it seems to have broken/disabled TerminalColours. Any tips for re-enabling? Or does this require a new build?
Here is a screenshot of the error message.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/rempe.us/ishot-28.jpg
Thanks,
Glenn
PS (See Previous Post):
Here are the details of my installation location and the permissions.
http://pastie.caboo.se/150615
This was working under 10.5.1
Thanks for the help,
Glenn
To hack the TerminalColours bundle to work in Leopard 10.5.2 update:
Install XCode developer tools from Leopard DVD.
Locate the bundle in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins (Finder Shift+G and paste the above)
Open the TerminalColours bundle (rightclick -> Show Contents…)
Open Contents -> Info.plist
Change Root -> SIMBLTargetApplications -> 0 -> MaxBundleVersion value to 240.
Save and relaunch Terminal.
Works for me, but as you know, something may break… you have been warned.
You can reactivate TerminalColours.bundle by editing BundleVersion properties in Info.plist.
Open Terminal and follow the TerminalColours.bundle installation path.
Inside the bundle directory, there should be Content/Info.plist file.
Open it with your favorite editor and substitute every string “237″ with “240″(it appears twice in the file).
Reload Terminal.
Compatibility issue may exist, but it works fine for me.
@Heejong Lee: Thanks for the tip! This also seems to work fine for me.
@Heejong Lee: Thanks for the tip! Never realized how ugly the default terminal colors looks like. Thanks to you, I don’t have to suffer for another minute.
[...] TerminalColours – Original Post [...]
Strange… I followed the instructions exactly and changed both 237′s to 240. Saved and relaunched Terminal but the colors are still missing.
Scratch my above comment. I was mistaken and it works now (I think)
I did the steps outlined above, but it still crashes Terminal.app
Has anyone run into TerminalColours crashing? This is on a G5, with 10.5.2.
Wes –
Yes, it broke on my machine after I upgraded to 10.5.2
[...] to Todd for putting this together, and more thanks to Ciarán Walsh and Terminal [...]
OS X Changing Terminal.app ANSI Colors…
Since Apple released their latest release of MacOS X, changing the Terminal application’s colors have once again become a pain. Even with the previous release, you could drag and drop colors from the color swatch to the color you wanted to change. Thi…
Thank you! This has bothered me for so long and now there is a simple fix.
Hey! I can’t get this to work for the life of me:
http://tinyurl.com/2sad9y (Sorry for the tinyurl, it’s a picture of my terminal, proving I installed it correctly, but it isn’t there)
Any tips? I chown’d, installed, etcetra. What am I doing wrong?
This isn’t working for me at all.
All correctly installed. I’ve chowned. Everything. Even edited the info.plist. Nothing.
I’m not receiving any error messages, I’m simply not getting a “more…” option under terminal.
Is there anything I need to do to activate SIMBL? Is there a way to check if it’s running properly?
Any help appreciated.
Leopard – Finally!…
So, I upgraded to MacOS 10.5 recently (from 10.4). Those of you who know me will doubtless be thinking “my god, man, what took so long?!?”, and that’s a longer story than I want to get into right now. Suffice……
Thanks for porting this for Leopard, my eyes were starting to hurt.
It seems to load and work okay — but it seems to be failing to save my settings (as others reported above). I did create my own theme and changed the settings there, and set it to Default, but it still reverts the settings once I quit Terminal and re-launch.
Actually .. it looks like it might have saved some of them, but not all of them, and I can’t seem to get it to change what it has saved.
Thanks thanks thanks!
Many, many thanks. The dark blue on black background was driving me nuts.
@Will (and others having issues with settings not being saved):
I had this issue as well. Once I got things tweaked the way I wanted, I exported my settings (Gear Icon -> Export…), deleted the original, then re-imported them. Seemed to do the trick.
[...] found that the default blue color was very difficult to read against the dark background. I found this which lets you customize the Terminal colors on a per-profile basis. Very [...]
So are those of us on x86_64 Leopard just out of luck now? I seemed to have had this working in early versions of Leopard, but it broke during one of the updates somewhere along the line.
Nevermind… got things working on Leopard x86_64
There is so much conflicting information and instructions out there for all these bundles.
I got it to work by setting all the permissions as they are instructed by the textmate wiki, linked from this blog entry.
But both this post, and the textmate wiki tell you to put the bundles in the incorrect place.
They should be in /Library/Application\ Support/SIMBL/Plugins
Yay, works for me on 10.5.3 and 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo! The recipe: 1) Removed my previous attempts from ~/Library and /Library 2) Installed Xcode 3) Installed SIMBL 0.8.2 (goes in /Library/InputManagers) – it had the correct ownership root:admin 4) Copied TerminalColors.bundle (from step 2 in the original post) to /Library/Application\ Support/SIMBL/Plugins and changed the ownership to root:admin 5) Restarted Terminal.app – works!!!
I think I will be avoiding any further os x upgrades now….
Well, I didn’t avoid the upgrade to 10.5.4 (and why does everyone tend to also specify their CPU?) because I found this hack afterward. For me, the bright colors will not apply to the terminal.
My settings: disable Use bold fonts enable Use bright colors (export CLICOLOR_FORCE=’1′)
According to previous post, I’ve tried, but without success: 1. creating a new theme, 2. exporting and importing a theme, 3. moving ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/TerminalColors.bundle to /Library/InputManagers/SIMBL/Plugins plus chmod -R root:admin TerminalColors.bundle, 4. changing MinBundleVersion “237″ to “240″ (Max is already 240). 5. and restarting Terminal as necessary.
And there appears to be a bug. When changing a color (at least with a slider), selecting another color, then selecting the first color again, the first color is reset, or perhaps one slider. I can’t figure it out any more than that right now.
I’m having the same problem Particle Man with 10.5.4 what can we do?
THX!
Hi all,
Just to let you know I will be trying to update this – I’ve been away from an internet connection for a little while and I’ve not updated to 10.5.4 yet. As soon as I do I’ll do my best to get a fix out.
Ciarán
THX Ciarán!
[...] Reference: http://ciaranwal.sh/2007/11/01/customising-colours-in-leopard-terminal [...]
@Ciarán Have you found a solution?
Rasheed: sorry, I’ve been trying to concentrate on fixing SVNMate. I have actually upgraded to 10.5.4 though and didn’t have any issues ith this plug-in at all, it all works fine.
It sounds like Particle Man is actually just commenting about the bright colours, not that the plug-in doesn’t work. You probably just need to configure SIMBL properly.
Ciarán: I don’t know if it’s because of SIMBL or your hack (“the plug-in”?). For me, the hack/plug-in loads fine. While changing the dark colors changes them in Terminal, changing the bright colors does not.
Are you saying that it works properly for you? If so, how do you configure SIMBL “properly” for the plug-in to work? Apparently the given instructions do not work for at least Rasheed and myself.
The problem for me is same as Particle Man, the bright colors..
All is working fine with the exception of the pesky error window on Terminal startup that is not selected by default and can not be selected with cmd-~ so you have to mouse to it. : ( I downloaded from: http://ciaranwal.sh/files/TerminalColours.bundle.zip
==err == Terminal 2.0.1 (v240) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColors 0.2.1 (v5). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer (not the SIMBL author) for further information. == end err ==
I custom configuration and it saves fine I had a window group which for some reason needed to be updated.
I deleted it duplicated the working custom config
and created the groups again with same name.
As a result my key binding for the group still works.
ED: You most likely have an old version installed as well as the current one. Check in
~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/PlugIns.[...] amazing SIMBL plugin by Ciaran Walsh (of TextMate plugin fame) that fixes that. Check it out at his site. It’s probably one of the more useful plugins I [...]
YES!! Thank you so much. This will now be the first thing I install on any new macs. Please add support to change the font color like this Apple! This man knows how to do it!!
Has anyone gotten this to work with 10.5.5? If so, what steps did you have to take?
erik
I’ve gotten this to work in 10.5.5, just as described: 1) Install PlugSuit (don’t know if this is required) 2) Install SIMBL. I didn’t have to remove anything from ~/Library. Maybe because this is a fresh Mac (bought today). 3) Download the TerminalColors.bundle and put it into /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/
Launch Terminal, go to Preferences, click on Text tab and the “More” key is there. My eyes thanked Ciaran!
this add-on rocks!! even if it is a bit tricky with having to “copy” the color profile for it to save the settings..
Hey, this is just so … reliving !! That won’t change the world, but it will definitely save my eyes ! Thanks
I join the praising chorus: Brilliant, man.
[...] Ciarán Walsh’s SIMBL plugin that adds customizable ANSI colors to [...]
Best tip i had since i got my macbook (3 weeks ago!). Thank you V-E-R-Y much!
On Tiger, I have been using the TerminalColors hack with a couple of aliases on the desktop to .term files to start up Terminal with different settings. One starts a Terminal running pine, while the other just brings up a shell, with different colors.
Now with the new Terminal in Leopard and with the two sets of settings exported to .terminal files (and the aliases updated to point to them), each time I invoke one of those aliases it starts the Terminal window as desired but treats this as an import of new settings. Thus, in the list of settings in the Settings window I now have Pine 1, Pine 2, …
With the Terminal icon in the dock I could start up the the desired settings using the right-click menu, but that is much harder than just clicking on an icon. Is there a way to easily start Terminal with one of a few different settings?
Thank You!
I teach, so my students thank you as well!
[...] public links >> simbl Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal First saved by iluvutubeitrocks | 11 days ago Flagit!: Customised flags for Mail.app First [...]
[...] you have trouble with too dark colors you might want to install SIMBL and then follow these instructions witch would allow you to change colors tough the [...]
[...] SIMBL and TerminalColors following the instructions on Ciarán Walsh’s blog. This is required for the color changes in [...]
[...] this great theme. Something that deserves a mention is Ciaran O’Leary’s blog entry on customizing color schemes in Leapord. This is an essential pre-requisite to any color themes you wish to use. You must install SIMBL [...]
Still working great!
FYI to modify a built-in scheme just change something else after tweaking the colors and it will save.
Thanks!!!
[...] Ciarán Walshs Blog ” Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal [...]
[...] Customising Colours in Leopard Terminal [...]
[...] de instalar o SIMBL, baixe o bundle TerminalColours. Copie o arquivo TerminalColours.bundle para /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/. Agora, [...]
[...] Él a su vez hace referencia a otro blog de Ciarán Walsh, quien modificó una extensión para la Terminal para que funcione en Leopard. [...]
I was able to leave the plugin in:
~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins
The only thing I had to change was the plugin permissions to root:admin
Thanks for all the hard work
[...] add a plugin that allows you to change your terminal colors, called appropriately enough TerminalColours.bundle. The main google link brought me to an installer that didn’t work for me. The URL is to a [...]
“Terminal 1.5.1 (v133-1) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColours (null) (v1.0). As a precaution, it has not been loaded.”
Is there a fix for this?
ah Leopard only, lame… cheers to all who can read.
Unfortunately, TerminalColours no longer works on Snow Leopard. I did the following to get the SIMBL extension to load, but it doesn’t seem to enable xterm-color (256 colors) in Terminal.app:
GetInfo on Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities – Check “Run in 32-bit mode” Show package contents on ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/TerminalColours.bundle – Modify Contents/Info.plist – Change SIMBLTargetApplications > Item 0 > MaxBundlerVersion to 268
The plugin will now load when launching Terminal.app. You can change colors in the Terminal.app preferences; however, only 16 colors are available in the terminal window. xterm-256 is not enabled.
Has anyone gotten any closer than this to enabling 256 colors in Snow Leopards’ terminal? I can’t believe Apple didn’t update terminal to support xterm-color by default! Argh!
Leave apple a request
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
[...] de Leopard (OS X 10.5) no permite modificar los colores, para esto hay que instalar SIMBL y este bundle (sigue las instrucciones) y así será [...]
[...] and referenced here: http://ciaranwal.sh/2007/11/01/customising-colours-in-leopard-terminal [...]
Thank you soo much, just saved my eyes
No go on Snow leopard
@Deavon – are you getting any luck to get it to work?
same, no go on snow leopard
SIMBL Error: http://twitpic.com/fkmba
Managed to get it to load by changing the MaxBundleVersion to 272 in the TerminalColors info.plist but changing to colors does not affect the colors in Terminal.app
I’ve update the source for TerminalColours and written a post about how to get it working in 10.6.
Hope this works for you all!
http://evanphx.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/fixing-colors-in-terminal-app-on-10-6/
Evan just coded something for Snow Leopard, go download from http://evanphx.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/fixing-colors-in-terminal-app-on-10-6/
To those running Snow Leopard:
evanphx’s fork works great:
http://evanphx.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/fixing-colors-in-terminal-app-on-10-6/
Looking into this a bit further, I tried the “old” approach, ie. doing an “Export…” of the theme to a .terminal file and editing that. It looks like the colours are stored just as before as serialized NSColor objects.
I took a known working .terminal export from my other still-Leopard Mac, confirmed the customised colours are in the file, and loaded it. No luck: it ignores the colours.
Once SIMBL and TerminalColours are working and loaded (using the 32-bit setting and bumping MaxBundleVersion up), I think TerminalColours is doing what it’s meant to, but Terminal.app is just ignoring the settings.
I did a “strings” on the Terminal.app binary, and it looks like strings such as “blueColor” are still there, as are methods like “colorForANSIColor:”.
Interestingly, one thing has changed: in Leopard .terminal files, these settings were spelled “blueColour”, whereas in Snow Leopard, they’ve changed to “blueColor”. Bizarrely, I can’t find any mention of “blueColour” in the Leopard Terminal.app strings, so I don’t know how that’s working.
The investigation continues…
Oh, it looks like someone’s already done it
Serves me right for not adequately googling.
http://evanphx.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/fixing-colors-in-terminal-app-on-10-6/
This looks pretty good, hopefully Apple will make it official some day.
Note that there’s an ANSI colors editor in MacTelnet, which can be used as a replacement for Terminal on Mac OS X. I personally find it more customizable for these kinds of things.
This solution was working fine for me in Snow Leopard, but after a reboot, this no longer works. Terminal.app is still set for 32-bit mode, but all my lovely colors are gone.
Hmmmm… Re-installing SIMBL seems to fix my problem. I hope I don’t have to reinstall every time I reboot.
Thanks!!!
Hey, I went through Trance’s, Rasheed, and Particle Man’s post but I never saw a solution.
Is there a way to get bright colors to work? I would like to have 16 colors to play with instead of 8. I would like, for instance, bright red to be a dark grey instead of a lighter value of the red color. Unfortunately the terminal seems to just add a hex value to whatever the normal color is.
Thanks!
Awesome! Solved a problem that has bugged me for a year now! Thanks!
FYI, the plugin doesn’t seem to work on Snow Leopard. Below is a screenshot of the error message:
http://cheeze.org/terminalcolours-sl-broken.png
I’ve installed the latest version of SIMBL (0.9.3b) and restarted Terminal a few times, and always get this message, so I don’t know what to do at this point. Would appreciate a response either way.
[...] [ciaran+evanphx+darwin] integrated Terminal Colours SIMBL [...]
Big tyme problem, I’ve been @ this 4 3 days…
OS = 10.5.8 SIMBL = 0.8.2 (Plugins wont run newest ver.) Visor = 2.0.1 (TermColors built in! Will only run w/ SIMBL 0.8.2)
I’ve tried all the different versions w/ each other and still nothing. The ANSI “More…” option shows, but no colors in term. I’ve even tried Duplicating Settings to no effect.
Someone please come up with a hack before I bust a vein in my brain.
OK, I think I figured it out, but it was a pain in the but and there are little tweaks that are easy to miss.
[IMG]http://i954.photobucket.com/albums/ae21/lacertaphreak/VisorColors.png[/IMG]
How does it look?
http://github.com/brodie/terminalcolours/downloads has the latest terminalcolour with 10.6, 64bit terminal, and simbl .9.x support.
SIMBL has updated to 64-bit. Can you please update TerminalColours to work with the new version of Terminal.
Here is a screenshot of what happens when Terminal tries to load the plugin: http://i33.tinypic.com/imqna8.png
Thanks!
I made a tiny patch for 64-bit support and fix new tab bug. http://www.piu.fm/terminaltabswitching.sl.patch
Oops, wrong post. That was patch for tab switching.
Here’s a patch with 64-bit support, also fixes font size on “More…” button: http://www.piu.fm/terminalcolours.sl.diff
Had this working on 10.5.x, but no luck w/ 10.6.1. The “More” button shows up; however, Terminal ignores the colors.
SIMBL-0.9.7a TerminalColours w/ Alex’s 64bit patch
Anyone get this working on Snow Leopard? I see the More button but the colors are still jacked…
I wish I could get this working in snow leopard, I miss the visual cues about my files.
I’m also looking to get colors workin’ in Snow Leopard… Help!!
I merged evanphx’s Snow Leopard fixes with other 64bit fixes I found on github. With this newer bundle and the newest SIMBL that works on Snow Leopard, you don’t need to open the Terminal in 32bit mode any more.
http://github.com/timmfin/terminalcolours/raw/master/TerminalColours-SL-64bit.zip
Follow the same instructions: install the latest SIMBL for Snow Leopard, unzip the file, copy the bundle to the SIMBL plugin folder, and then restart Terminal.app.
ps: I’m a total xcode/objective-c newb, so let me know if I did anything wrong
@timmfin: That still isn’t working for me. Do I have to do anything special?
@Jake: No, you shouldn’t need to do anything special. To double check, follow these steps:
Hope this helps. Anyone else having trouble with this bundle?
Thanks for the reply, @timmfin. The “More” button does appear, but the colors in Terminal are not affected at all. Still just white text.
@jake: Hrm. Here are a few last guesses.
Do you have “Display ANSI colors” checked? Also you need to make sure that the profile you are editing matches the terminal window that is open. To double check, used the Shell -> New window menu action to pick the exact profile you are editing.
@timmfin:
I followed your instructions, puts all buddles under ~/Library/Application Settings/SIMBL/Plugins folder, it didn’t work, but when i moved these buddles to ~/Library/Application Supports/SIMBL/Plugins, it works!
Thank you all the same
@liwei: Thanks, I must have totally blanked out when I was typing those instructions. I thought I was helping people (instead of referring them to the original instructions far above)… but I actually made it a lot harder
.
Is this totally working for people on Snow Leopard? I get the “More” button, but the colors in my terminal are not affected at all? Anyone else?
Finally got this working again by removing TerminalColors then restarting Terminal.app. Installing it cleanly and making sure that root has read/write to the bundle seems to have fixed it.
Thanks for all this -everyone!
Yeah I have the same issues on Snow Leopard. The Bundle is installed and the “more” button is available and displaying the contents. When I ssh to a linux box the colours work fine but when I get back to my local Terminal its still in white. Any help with this would be great?
[...] TerminalColors plugin for SIMBL (instructions available on Ciarán Walsh’s blog). If you are using Snow [...]
[...] you want to further customize colors on your Mac OS X Terminal, you can use SIMBL TerminalColours plugin (Snow Leopard [...]
Well, I can’t get this to work – I installed the newest version of SIMBL, put the plugin into the right folder, but all I get when I run terminal is:
“Terminal 2.1 (v272) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColours (null) (v1.0). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer for further information.”
Having the same “More..” button appears but colors don’t” issue on SL with a fresh install of SIMBL 0.9.7a, and @timmfin’s TerminalColors SL 64-bit compatible plugin (from GitHub) located in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/.
Has anyone found a resolution for this issue?
Found the solution! I had to add the following to my .bash_profile
colorize the Terminal
export GREP_OPTIONS=’–color=auto’ export CLICOLOR=1;
Weird… post got reformatted. Trying again:
If you don’t have one already, create a .bash_profile file in your home dir, then add these lines:
export GREP_OPTIONS=’–color=auto’ export CLICOLOR=1;
Here we go again (in markdown):
I tried and i succeed thanks.
yay I finally got this to work.
I’m running:
At first this didn’t work because I installed SIMBL-0.9.7a from http://culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php. However, it turns out that SIMBL-0.9.7a is actually intended for Snow Leopard, so I uninstalled it. I installed SIMBL-0.8.2, and now the plugin works.
However, when I start Terminal.App, I get popup warning dialog which says:
“Terminal 2.0.2 (v240.2) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColors 0.2.1 (v5). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer (not the SIMBL author) for further information.”
[...] SIMBL et TerminalColors en suivant les info de Ciarán Walsh’s sur son [...]
[...] 下载更改终端颜色所需的SYMBL插件 – SYMBL bundle [...]
[...] Leopard 2.安装TerminalColors(可以参考Ciarán Walsh’s blog上的文章) 在http://ciaranwal.sh/files/TerminalColours.bundle.zip下载,解压到 [...]
Note to the author: Some of the newer blog posts contain Spam. Please check into it.
I was helping people (instead of referring them to the original instructions far above)
In this model, many faults … which is affected … and you may want to change anything More info
This resolved that error for me:
Download the updated TerminalColours.bundle for Snow Leopard here: http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2009/08/28/fixing-colors-in-terminal-app-on-10-6/
Put it in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/
Go to the Utilities folder –> right-click on Terminal.app –> click on “Open in 32-bit mode”
I am using SIMBL 0.97a, and also using Infinitered’s Terminal Theme found here (optional): http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6
Problem Resolved! Thanks to tips from you guys and some troubleshooting on my own, I have fixed the issue on my SnowLeopard (10.6.4) and would like to post the solution for anyone else with the same problem.
Requirements: Snow Leopard (I have 10.6.4) Terminal running in 64 bit mode, version 2.1.1 SIMBL (0.9.7) (older version should be fine) Visor 2.2 or TerminalColours.bundle (NOT newest version: will explain shortly)
Procedure: If you are getting the following error message “Terminal 2.1.1 (v273) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColours (null) (v1.0). As a precaution…”, and you can’t get rid of it by removing TerminalColours.bundle, then you must completely remove SIMBL and re-install it. This includes the simbl.osax file. Before removing SIMBL, store any .bundle files you might have currently installed temporarily on your desktop. Delete the TerminalColours.bundle. They are located at ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL.
The files you must remove are:
Now re-intall SIMBL (http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php) and the error message should be GONE. If not, you didn’t completely uninstall SIMBL.
Now you should install Visor 2.2 (http://visor.binaryage.com/) or if you don’t want visor, just the TerminalColours.bundle which DOESN’T cause the error message (http://bwaht.net/code/TerminalColours.bundle.zip). That said, I really really recommend Visor. Even if you don’t want the dropdown, you don’t have to enable this feature in Visor. Also, I have tested this method using Visor on two computers and it works.
If you decide to use TerminalColours.bundle, you need to right click on the bundle in finder, and click “Show Package Contents…”, open the “Info.plist” file and change the MaxBundleVersion to 273, and CFBundleIdentifier to sh.ciaranwal.terminal-colours, or just see Ted Naleid’s post above.
The next step is to create a text file called .bash_profile which has the following content:
colorize the Terminal
export GREP_OPTIONS=’–color=auto’ export CLICOLOR=1;
save the file in your home directory (~)
Open Terminal and it should be working.
If you are annoyed by the “window blinking” issue when Terminal Opens (caused by Visor), i highly recommend adding Terminal to your login items and checking the “Hide” box.
Terminal 2.1.1 (v273) has not been tested with the plugin TerminalColours (null) (v1.0). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer for further information.
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[...] want good, configurable colors in my shell. Fortunately, Visor takes care of this one by including TerminalColours as part of the package, so you get this one “for [...]
Seconding Marcio Toledo’s (post 169) response. Can you fix this? I miss your plugin. :[
Thirding post 169… I’ve never used TerminalColours before but all roads on the internet lead to this page for people looking to have decent terminal coloring.
[...] de instalar o SIMBL, baixe o bundle TerminalColours. Copie o arquivo TerminalColours.bundle para /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/. Agora, [...]
Post 169-173 says it all !!! What chance an update?
Ok after reading a bit higher up and fixes for other pre273 releases it seems to be working with the manual one work around
Note to other users…the reference to “CFBundleIdentifier” is called “Bundle identifier” if you are using the plist editor rather than the xml directly
Uhm, isn’t this already built in, or am I completely high? Because I can use colours without installing this. =)
I’m using Terminal 2.0.2 in OSX 10.5.8.
So, I had some trouble, but got it to work finally. All the answers are in the comments, but hard to find. The two tips I needed were:
1) comment 168, where I you change the max version in the info.plist. This gets rid of the plugin disabled because it’s not tested with this version error when you start up.
2) comment 67, you make changes to the theme, export them, delete the on you were editing, and import them. I couldn’t get changes to pick up without this.
Thanks,
got it to work on leopard also – thanks John – without visor installed the more button would not appear – with it, works a treat