Terminal is one of those hidden little gems in the Utilities folder, right there with Activity Monitor, Boot Camp, and Disk Utility. Chances are that if you use Terminal, you either work with CVS/Subversion, you’re some sort of UNIX geek, or you’ve been hacking something recently. I actually have used Terminal quite a bit during my days with the phpBB teams, falling under the first category (CVS/SVN). Apple has actually found a way to chalk nine of it’s 300+ features to Terminal 2 in Leopard, which is probably quite amazing considering how important “features” would be to an app like this–it’s a terminal, for Pete’s sake! Anyway, today, I thought, what the heck, let’s take a look.

One big thing that Terminal gains in Leopard is something that should also have premiered in another application or two is tabs. Yes, you can now have different tabs within your one Terminal window, and those tabs have all the same features as Safari’s tabs–you can reorder them by dragging, you can drag them out to create a new window, and there’s a menu item for merging all windows into tabs. Yes, this would be quite nice for being able to do multiple things at once in the terminal, but still be nice and organized. In addition, when you open a new window with these tabs, you can choose from a number of window styles, or hop over into Terminal Preferences to set your own. Change the font, size, style of the text, and even set the colors of the window and even the background opacity. I like to have mine set to the black background with bright green text, so it looks just like those Apple II’s of the olden days (25-30 years ago).

However, if you’re going to have multiple tabs, multiple windows, all in special configurations, wouldn’t it be great to save all these open windows together with their specific configurations so you can pick them all up again right where you left off? Terminal 2 in Leopard introduces a few features for this. You can save all of your open windows and tabs together in a Window Group, which not only saves them together, but also remembers their location and configuration. If you have windows set in a particular way that you’ll want to come to many more times, you can save these into a profile that you can reopen later. Neat, eh?

These new features may be few, but like I said, how much stuff can you do to a terminal? You get my point. Nevertheless, for all you UNIX geeks out there, you can enjoy some new advantages to getting all your mindless hacking hard work done. Now if only we could get some of these features in some other OS X apps…

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: features, groups, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, tabs, Terminal, UNIX