Every time someone asks me for help for something geek on a Mac, I often prefer using the Terminal, because I never got used to editing a configuration file under /etc with a graphical text editor. Don't misunderstand me, I am not a Terminal addict, and I often prefer using graphical tools extremely integrated with Mac OS X: for example, I wouldn't code in C++ with something else than Xcode, which turns out to be an incredible IDE. But for some other things, I still launch this Terminal, and there are a few things in its default configuration I never liked, such as the behaviour of the keys page up/page down, home/end, etc.
So, let me tell you how you can configure your Terminal like I did on my mac, running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6.
General settings
First, launch Terminal (using Spotlight, my favorite!), open the Preferences window, and click on Settings. Here, in the tab Text, you will see on the left a list of predefined themes with different colors. To be sure this will work (specially if you already changed some preferences here), you can click on the cogwheel button next to the minus button, and choose Restore Defaults. Then, you should decide which theme you would like to use. I always preferred a black terminal with white text, so I chose the theme called Pro. Just take the one you like. But don't forget to click the button Default if you decide to change your default theme.
In order to have a much more beautiful text on your terminal, you should check the box Antialias text.
If you don't understand either why a Terminal window doesn't close automatically once the shell exits (for example, when using the common shortcut ^+D), then you should go to the Shell tab, and under When the shell exits: select Close the window.
Keys and actions
Let's go to the tricky part: keys actions. Go to the Keyboard tab, and set the following keys to corresponding actions:
Key & modifier Action Corresponding string
(if applicable)What to type?
(if applicable)control cursor left send string to shell \033b esc B control cursor right send string to shell \033f esc F home send string to shell \001 ^+A end send string to shell \005 ^+E page up send string to shell \033[5~ esc [5~ page down send string to shell \033[6~ esc [6~ shift home scroll to start of buffer shift end scroll to end of buffer shift page up scroll to previous page in buffer shift page down scroll to next page in buffer
As you will see, when typing the corresponding string in the text area under send string to shell, every keystroke you type can create a weird output. So you should just type what is in the last column, knowing that esc represents the escape button, that ^ is the control button, and that + means press both keys at the same time.
What if you use a remote screen with ssh on a Linux server?
Everything should work properly now... except if you're like me and you often use a screen on Linux boxes through ssh. If you didn't even understand this sentence, you should just skip this part.
In this case, your backspace key won't work properly on the remote screen, and it's a shame. To solve this problem, the best solution I found was to upload the file /usr/share/terminfo/78/xterm-color of the Mac to the server (with scp for instance, or with the excellent Cyberduck application through SFTP) and to do the following:
% mkdir -p ~/.terminfo/x/
% mv ~/path/to/xterm-color ~/.terminfo/x/
This trick works fine enough for me, but if you use a remote screen on many different Linux servers, then it can be a pain. Hopefully, you only need it for a single account on a single Linux server where you run irssi in a screen like me; in this case, you just found the solution for the backspace problem.
The end
And you're done! Just quit the Terminal application, launch it again. That's it!
One last word, you should also look at the feature called Window groups: it allows you to save the way several Terminal windows are on the screen, and it can be useful for someone who often uses more than one Terminal window at a time.
Enjoy!