One thing that always bothered the crap out of me about OS X was their implementation of 'Terminal'. Staring at a black box with only white text is quite unnerving. I'm not sure how their seemingly graphically-anal designers at Apple could handle it. Anyways, there's fortunately an easy solution to this ginormous problem.

There's an excellent tutorial that runs through the process of customizing just about everything with Terminal, but I'm going to get right to the point with as little extra stuff as possible.

The very first thing we need to do is actually enable colors in our Terminal. Pop open Terminal. You should automatically be at your home directory to start, but if you're not, just:

Now we need to create a file titled '.bash_profile'. This file gets loaded every time you open a new Terminal session. Create a new file with VIM like so:

and enter the following:

Save the file with ':wq'. Essentially, all this says is 'load a file called .bashrc'. Each user can have a .bashrc file. Create your .bashrc file:

and enter the following:

The above is what enables the colors for your terminal. Save the file.

You could now quit terminal, and start a new session, and you should have colors. The default colors aren't so nice, though. Luckily, a few quick plugins will allow us to customize the colors. Ciarán Walsh runs through these steps, or you an follow along below.

First, install SIMBL. Second, download Ciarán's SIMBL plugin. You can now quit terminal, restart, and you'll see a 'More' button in Terminal settings allowing you to customize your colors.

I personally use InfiniteRed's theme here.

So now everything is beautiful, except for VIM. I use VIM quite a bit throughout my day, so this is important for me. Luckily, there's a simple fix for this as well. Navigate to your home directory, and create the file '.vimrc', and enter the following code (or grab it from here):

That should take care of it. Enjoy!

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