Spice up your Mac Terminal

The Terminal isn’t known to be the most exciting application on your Mac, even though if you know how to use it it can be a pretty powerful one. Now most people that make use of it will probably not really worry about the way it looks as long as it works and lets them enter their commands the way they want. That shouldn’t stop you from wanting to spice up your Terminal a bit.

I’ve found a great application, iTerm, which gives a proper Cocoa styled interface to the Terminal. Not only does it add a proper menu bar with buttons for the most important functions, like opening a new Terminal window, closing it or viewing extra information. iTerm also lets you add specific bookmarks and expecially features an execute bar, which is great for launching those all important commands. Overall to, it feels much nicer than the boring old Terminal window.

Another great tip I found, from Hongkiat, allows you to add any sort of custom greeting message in your Terminal window. Launch the Terminal then type sudo pico /etc/motd and enter your password. Type in your own MOTD (Message Of The Day) and press Control X to save. The custom message will appear at Terminal startup. You can change it any time you want.