How to change the escape style when dropping paths into Terminal

terminal

If I drop a file from Finder (or another file source) into the Terminal, the system helpfully escapes characters like spaces: Dropping a file named /Lorem Ipsum.txt yields /Lorem\ Ipsum.txt.

I would like to change this behavior to use quotation marks instead, so that /Lorem Ipsum.txt would yield '/Lorem Ipsum.txt' instead (note the single quotation marks and the missing backslash).

Is there a way to do this using the standard Terminal.app? If not, is it maybe possible with iTerm or something else?

Edit

The reason why I want to do this is that I am using xonsh that parses the backslash as a literal character, echo /Lorem\ Ipsum.txt prints /Lorem\ Ipsum.txt.

Most of the time I will just manually delete the backslashes, and sometimes I use the following workaround:

Enter @(r"
Drop the file – this will fill a string literal with the path using backslash-escapes
Enter ".replace("\\",""))

Best Answer

I can confirm that iTerm2 does exactly what you want in regards to enclosing long file names and directories with single quotes instead of escaping the spaces when dragging and dropping. It does this by default.

There are many additional reasons and benefits to switch to iTerm2 from the default Terminal on macOS. Far too many to list here.

Update for iTerm 3.4

iTerm 3.4 changed the escaping behavior to use backslash escaping as well. However, there is an advanced experimental feature Escape file names with single quotes instead of backslashes. that reverts the escaping back. The comment even specifies my very use case: This is intended for users of xonsh, which does not accept backslash escaping.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Adding movie-style sound effects to the Terminal

Fun question :)

I'm not sure how you would get sound effects for everything but you could do something like this to get sound effects for a few things:

1) Open open your .profile (or .bashrc or wherever you like to keep your customizations) by opening a terminal window and typing:

open .profile

2) Add the following few lines to the bottom of the file:

function top() { afplay /System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component/Contents/SharedSupport/SystemSounds/accessibility/Sticky\ Keys\ ON.aif; command top;}
function ls() { command ls; afplay /System/Library/Components/CoreAudio.component/Contents/SharedSupport/SystemSounds/accessibility/Slow\ Keys\,\ Key\ Registered.aif; }

3) Try typing 'ls' for a directory listing or 'top' to see the list of running processes & you'll get to hear the results of these commands.

By adding these two lines we are declaring two new functions with the same names as existing bash commands. We override the command itself so that we can play a bit of audio and then run the command itself (or vice versa as shown the 'top' example).

The audio files I am currently using are default audio files (at least on Lion) that are used for accessibility features. I chose these so that you could cut-paste, and see the trick in action but you could use any audio file in place of these.

Here's a site with a bunch of sci-fi sound effects you could use in place of these ones I'm borrowing from the OS:

http://fxhome.com/sounds/

N escape sequence that will change the background color in Terminal

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.