How to setup the Mac OS X Terminal so it's *just peachy*?
- by kch
Hi all,
My Terminal is awesome, has every detail just right (for me anyway), and now I'm setting up a few new macs around here and I have no idea whatsoever how to get their terminals to a pretty state. My user account is rather old, has been migrated over many OS X releases and machines, so my Terminal setup has grown rather organically over the years.
What I need is a recipe to start from scratch, so 1) I know what I've done, and 2) I can reproduce it anywhere.
Things I'm looking for:
Full UTF8 support. Setting LC_*, displaying characters correctly, accepting input… I hear this got much easier in 10.5, maybe it all works out of the box now?
Setup of OS X-style keyboard text navigation (option-arrows, etc)
How you particularly handle meta-key support? (other than ESC'ing your way around)
Other things to help our n00bs get around in the shell, such as:
List of useful default key bindings (^A, ^D, etc…)
Mac-specific .profile, .inputrc goodness
Mac-specific tools such as pbpaste & pbcopy, Open Terminal Here, etc
If at all possible, a list of files to copy over to another machine that encompasses all the changes made to tune the Terminal. (dotrc files, plists, etc)
And, well, anything else really. Just keep the scope on the Mac OS X Terminal application, rather than general unix setup and tools.
I think a collection of incomplete answers would be a good start. Post one or two things you remember having done, we'll vote them up, and after a few days I'll try to compile it all into a summary answer.
