OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day  

Week 99 - Terminal Tricks (21 February 2005)

by Adrian Mayo - Editor, OSXFAQ

Thursday - Terminal.app Nifty Features

Apple's Terminal.app has a few nifty features that you may or may not have encountered.

Split Screen. Click the little 'split' icon situated top left above the vertical scroll bar, then drag the horizontal divider to adjust the top/bottom split ratio. The top pane can be used as a scroll-back to view and copy previous commands without disturbing the main window.

Drag and Drop. Drag any file or folder (or multiple files and folders) onto the terminal window and the full path name will be written to the prompt line. For example, to list the contents of a folder, type 'ls ' then drag the folder from the Finder onto the Terminal window and hit return.

Set a background. Most visual aspects of the terminal can be changed from menu item Terminal::Window Settings, including setting a background picture. Alternatively Alt-drag a picture onto the Terminal window to instantly set a background image.

Click to position cursor. This option has to be enabled in menu item Terminal::Windows Settings::Emulation. Check 'Option click to position cursor. You can now option click anywhere on the current command line to position the cursor at that point. This also works in text editors such as Pico and Vim.

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