OS X Terminal command to change color themes

Question

Is there a command that can be used to change the color scheme of the Mac OS X Terminal? I like the idea of being able to change colors depending on scripts I run. So far I am just changing the color of my bash prompt with PS1 which is okay but not as noticeable as I'd like.

Answer 1

Depending on what exactly you want to accomplish, here's a few ideas in AppleScript using your Terminal styles. These are more robust than tput, because this gets reset by colored prompts. etc (at least for me).

This sets all tabs running Python (no SSH server available for testing right now) to Homebrew, the others to Ocean:

tell application "Terminal"
    repeat with w from 1 to count windows
        repeat with t from 1 to count tabs of window w
            if processes of tab t of window w contains "Python" then
                set current settings of tab t of window w to (first settings set whose name is "Homebrew")
            else
                set current settings of tab t of window w to (first settings set whose name is "Ocean")
            end if
        end repeat
    end repeat
end tell

save as script and run as osascript Name.scpt anytime you want to re-color your shells (of course you can wrap this as a shell script or something).

If you want to display all long-running processes differently, use the following condition:

if busy of tab t of window w is true then

---

Or, you can set the style of a single tab, manually selected:

on run argv
    tell application "Terminal" to set current settings of tab (item 1 of argv as number) of front window to first settings set whose name is (item 2 of argv)
end run

Run it like this:

osascript StyleTerm.scpt 3 Homebrew

-> Third tab of frontmost Terminal window gets Homebrew style!

If you want to modify background windows, replace "front window" with a parenthesized expression like just after "tab". If you always want to modify the selected "current tab", use selected tab instead of tab (item 1 of argv as number).

---

Add the following to your .bash_profile if the first solution is too manual labour for you:

PROMPT_COMMAND='osascript "/path/to/Name.scpt"'

Now it gets executed before every prompt (only problem: not after starting something, i.e. ssh. But this topic isn't about fancy bash tricks anyway. This is just a pointer.)

Answer 2

The following article can be used as an example for changing the color theme:
A black OS X Leopard Terminal theme that is actually readable

This article relates to both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
One should also read the very useful comments of the article.

Answer 3

Your scripts can use the tput command to set colors in a portable manner. Try the following script and you will see the terminal clear to a dark cyan background with some bright cyan text.

#!/bin/bash
tput setab 6
tput clear
tput setaf 14
echo Hello World

You can see more information about this in man 5 terminfo in the section called "Color Handling".

You can do the same things by echoing the escape sequences that your terminal recognizes directly. It will be faster, but it may not work using another terminal program. Many of them recognize xterm sequences and here is what the script above would look like using them.

#!/bin/bash
printf "\033[48;5;6m"  # or "\033[46m"
printf "\033[H\033[2J" # your system's clear command does something similar
printf "\033[38;5;14m" # or "\033[96m"
echo Hello World

There's more information on xterm control sequences here.