ASCII Terminal Colors in Leopard

If you've changed your TCColorArray setting in the terminal to make the ASCII colors actually usable, either by hand or using the wonderful TerminalColors application, you'll be upset when you upgrade to Leopard.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to customize the default ASCII colors in the terminal. The default blue color is ridiculously hard to read on a black background.

I've upgraded to Leopard on my PowerBook, but after playing with the terminal for a few hours, I've decided that I can't upgrade to Leopard on my Mac Pro yet. At least 90% of my day is spent in the terminal, making this a complete show stopper for me 🙁

If anyone has found a workaround, please let me know!

stupidregister said:

So do colors appear by default in Leopard in ls output?

I always found that a black background in Terminal.app kind of sucks because the lack of window borders. It becomes difficult to see where one window ends and the next begins.

Click to expand...

No, you still need to run ls -G, which is fine. But the colors it produces aren't customizable. You can tell ls, or any other app such as vim, to use a color. But you can't give them RGB values, only a color number.

The terminal is responsible for displaying the correct color for a given color number (such as color 2). In Tiger, you could hack your terminal plist preferences file and customize what RGB value color 2 is.

ANSI Terminal Colors in Leopard

Here is an interesting update:

I copied Terminal.app from a Tiger install onto Leopard. I then restored all my Tiger terminal preferences. It appears that the Tiger version of Terminal running on Leopard is not honoring the colors listed in TCColorArray.

This is a complete mystery for me, as I expected it to work correctly. I'll keep poking around. If anyone has any suggestions, please post them.

This is another update in order to bring some completion to this thread.

I basically gave up on Terminal.app in Leopard. After playing with it for a pretty long time, I couldn't find a way to customize the ANSI colors, and the defaults were unusable for me.

After doing some research, I found that iTerm has come a long way, and is actually much better than Apple's terminal.

http://iterm.sourceforge.net/