I have been using
iTerm instead of Apple's
Terminal.app for several years. One of the main advantages of this
over the Terminal.app that comes with OS X is the tabbed window
feature. It has many other features that I also like, including
selection to copy text, middle-button-paste, transparency,
bookmarks, etc. It is available for free by two inspired authors
and regular updates are made available.
The labels on the tabs and title bar can each be customized so that
they dynamically display current information about what directory
you are in. This frees up valuable screen real estate that an
informative but long-winded prompt might consume. In fact, you can
have the title bar display one thing, like your full directory path
and machine name and anything else you want, and have the tabs
display something different, say the last two directories in your
path, or what program you are running in the window, or whatever
you wish (space on the tab is more limited than on the title
bar.)
The method used to achieve this result is different for each of the
shells on OS X. For that reason, I've made sample startup scripts
that do this for bash, tcsh and zsh users. (If you use ksh, you are
on your own. Perhaps it is time to switch to zsh, which is like ksh
but much more user-friendly.) These sample startup scripts are
linked in the table below.
In addition to the tab and title bar customizations, these sample
startup scripts also contain code that sets the $DISPLAY variable
if you are an X11.app user. The code is a bit more elaborate than
some versions, because it is designed to be compatible with Apple's
Fast User Switching. Once the $DISPLAY variable is properly set,
you can launch x-windows unix programs from iTerm; there is no need
to use xterm to do this.
Click on the links appropriate to your shell in the table below to
view or download the relevant sample startup file. Note that there
are two links for bash.
