Tag Archives: Terminal Emulators

Mac Tweakers <3 SIMBL, Visor & Fish

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While deciphering countless web pages for information about configuring and tuning iTerm, reoccurring themes from the most hard core are:

  • SIMBL: allows you to “patch” Mac applications to do what you want. I’ve come across at least 3 SIMBL plugins to make Apple Terminal.app more useful. The detractors cry that SIMBL destabilizes the OS, while its champions swear they’ve never had a problem.
  • Visor: ”a Quake-style drop-down Terminal” need I say more?
  • Fish: is the newest UNIX shell, it’s a friendly shell. The naysayers warn that it has a very small user community and that its development has slowed. The true believes proclaim that once you try it, there is no substitute for FISH in your diet.

I’m not currently considering using any of these, but I enjoyed coming across them.

Tuners Use zsh & iTerm

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One of the tools that I haven’t had much success really tuning before, which I’m looking to try again is Apple Terminal.

Mac OS X has been with us since 2001. There is now a lot of stale information out there for tuning the command line experience. For example, there are still a lot of articles about tsch in search results. The earlier versions of Mac OS X default shell was tsch, but since 2003 the shell has been bash.

One thing I’ve noticed in the screenshots of tuned Terminal is “zsh” in the window’s title bar. I’m not willing to tackle figuring out the zsh shell, but I find it interesting that it’s a favorite of the tuners.

Another favorite seems to be using iTerm. I noticed my co-worker Demitrious Kelly sporting iTerm in his WATCHME for wpshell. And today, reading my co-worker Andy Skelton’s “My SSH config setup” fellow WordPress contributor Dougal Campbell and my co-worker Donncha O Caoimh both gave iTerm shout outs.

I wonder if Apple Terminal has mostly caught up to iTerm. It seems iTerm might still have some tab advantages.