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 tuners1.
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 outs2.
I wonder if Apple Terminal has mostly caught up to iTerm. It seems iTerm might still have some tab advantages.
- Daniel Jalkut for example [↩]
- Output in Beginning Ruby seems to suggest that Peter Cooper uses iTerm as well [↩]
I’ve always found Terminal.app to be pretty much useless. For me it’s about like Windows’ cmd.
Zsh on the other hand is fantastic. It has a ton more features than bash, is more bourne shell compliant in its compatibility mode and typically uses less ram and cpu than bash. It has a super awesome completions system, great scripting syntax and a few awesome little things that I use all day long. For example, ** is a recursive wildcard, if you “echo **/*.txt” it will list all of the text files underneath the current directory. Zsh is chock-full of that kind of pragmatic useful functionality.
And if you care about these things, zsh is what NeXTStep used by default.
I use iTerm as well. EVER-so-slight advantage over Terminal, which you noted above. But as I spend as much time in terminals as in a web browser, the little things matter.
So…your “tuning” expedition is very interesting. I’ve moved towards tuning behaviours rather than apps, since in many cases, running as “stock” as possible means that I don’t have to spend a lot of time grooming my platform.
My “must have” list is increasingly migrating to the web, so on the desktop I’m reaching for a really minimal set of tools and can immediately be productive.
In other words, can you be more productive by NOT tuning? (although even that phrase is too simplistic)
@Boris, I completely agree that tuning behavior (replacing rituals) should be the real focus.
I’m finding looking at how others tune their apps exposes my own rituals.
I’d argue there is no surer path to being forced to tune (behavior) than by migrating to the web, where applications change constantly under your feet.
Zsh, ah that brings back memories! I haven’t used that in years but I really should do as it’s so powerful.
OS X is just a nicer frontend to Linux, or more correctly a bash prompt
@Donncha, “nice frontend”, now there is an understatement! And unfortunately, it’s not Linux, it’s the slightly awkward cousin BSD.