colorterminal
I work on a lot of tabs in terminal at a given time. Sometimes, I get tabs mixed up and accidently run commands on tabs I am not supposed to.
To simplify this, I wish to write some script, that on each new tab creation, comes with a random background color (not the text background, the window background), so that I can easily identify the tabs I was working with.
Any suggestions ?
You can add transparency and a blur effect to windows, and you can also set these values seperately for active windows vs inactive windows, making the inactive windows much more transparent for example.
You'll find these settings in Terminal.app Preferences - Settings - Window. Click the colour picker to define them.
I have this in my bash_profile:
# Change the terminal theme when SSH to remote
function tabc() {
NAME=$1; if [ -z "$NAME" ]; then NAME="Default"; fi
osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set current settings of front window to settings set \"$NAME\""
}
# Change the terminal color when remote
function ssh {
tabc "Hiltmon-Remote"
/usr/bin/ssh "$@"
tabc "Hiltmon"
}
It uses Applescript (which you don't want) to change the terminal profile. Replace the Hiltmon and Hiltmon-Remote with your own color scheme names. When you use the ssh command, the macro changes the shell theme, then runs ssh. When you exit the remote session, it changes it back. Very cool!
I tried using the shell color escape sequences like \[\e[36m\] and \[\e[0m\] but the remote session can and does reset them. This works great for me.
Best Answer
The built-in default "Solid Colors" profile randomly selects a background color for each new terminal.
It works by setting the background image to a folder of images, each of which is a solid color. To choose different colors (or patterns, etc.) you can place a collection of images in a folder and set a profile to use the folder in
Another feature of profiles is that if you create a new terminal with Shell > New Command or New Remote Connection it will look for a profile with a matching name and select that profile. It will look for a match of the entire command string, a partial match of the command name and arguments starting from the left, and it will also try to interpret the profile name as a regular expression.
This means you can name a profile “ssh” to have it selected for any
sshcommand, or “ssh hostname” for ssh commands whose first argument matches hostname, for example.