Prevent Mac Terminal from reverting to default theme

terminal

I can't find any way to change the Terminal theme and have that theme applied permanently.

I want to change to another darker theme other than the default 'basic' theme, and (most importantly) have it remain as the theme every time I open Terminal.

Best Answer

You need to select which profile you want to be your default in the preferences for the Terminal application. Here is a way you do that:

Open the Terminal.app
Select "Terminal" Menu then "Preferences..."
Select the "Profiles" tab (labelled "Settings" before Yosemite)
Click and highlight a theme listed under Profiles.
Press the "Default" button near the bottom of the window.
Open a new Terminal window, it should now have the theme that you selected as the new default.

Note: Existing terminal windows will not change to the newly selected default theme, you will need to close and re-open terminal windows to get the theme to be applied.

OS X Terminal Settings for color themes

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On Snow Leopard you can install the TerminalColours plugin, which lets you modify the default colours.

On Lion you get a thoroughly updated Terminal.app that lets you do this out of the box and also supports 256 colours by default.

Change the default action to open executable files in the editor instead of Terminal

Run plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.launchservices.plist and add an entry like this under LSHandlers:

<dict>
    <key>LSHandlerContentType</key>
    <string>public.unix-executable</string>
    <key>LSHandlerRoleAll</key>
    <string>com.macromates.textmate</string>
</dict>

You can also change the default application for normal files with no extension:

<dict>
    <key>LSHandlerContentType</key>
    <string>public.plain-text</string>
    <key>LSHandlerRoleAll</key>
    <string>com.macromates.textmate</string>
</dict>

You can apply the changes by restarting. Just logging out and back in doesn't seem to work. You could also rebuild the Launch Services database, but it has the side-effect that the warnings about opening applications for the first time are shown again.

Another option is to add something like this to a duti configuration file:

com.macromates.textmate public.unix-executable all
com.macromates.textmate public.plain-text all

To make this question more searchable, here is the error message Finder shows when you try to change the default application for executable scripts:

The operation can’t be completed.

An unexpected error occurred (error code -50).

Best Answer

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Change the default action to open executable files in the editor instead of Terminal

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