EDIT-XTREEM’s Blog

Within those daunting 300 new features of Leopard, I noticed one section that caught my eye. There were new features in Terminal, Apple’s behind the scenes shell app that also allows you to do SSH and other types of connections. It is not that frequent that Apple adds features to an application such as Terminal, but I guess in an attempt to round that number up to 300, they have added a few unusual ones. In this article, I will outline most of the new features, and give you my opinion on them, providing a few screenshots.

Inspector

First off, I am going to take a look at the Inspector. We are familiar with the Inspector from Preview and the Finder, but it has now been added to Terminal. It does not add much functionality to Terminal, but it does allow you to change the Terminal window name, the window size (measured in columns and rows), and view your active processes in Terminal. All in all, the inspector is not a very useful feature.

Themes

“Themes” is another useless yet cool feature in the new Terminal. These are basic themes, some even semi-transparent for your Terminal window. There are 7 pre-made themes, but I am sure with a bit of clever work, new themes can be added with some custom styles. I personally, think that the themes make Terminal look less geeky, but I do not think they add any functionality, and if anything, are just a distraction.

Tabbed Windows

Probably my favorite new feature in Terminal is tabs, rather than having many cluttered Terminal windows, you can simply have one window with tabs. Similar to Safari, these tabs can be re-arranged, dragged in and out of the window, and be individually closed. I really like having the non-cluttered Terminal, as I find it helps me concentrate at the task I am trying to perform, rather than being overwhelmed with the many windows I have open.

Conclusion

The new update to Terminal in Leopard adds some solid functionality, while keeping it a very stable and consistent app. I think that some of the new features are gimmicky, such as the themes and the Inspector, but I think that in the longrun, once the power of these features is fully usable, they will be useful tools to have, and many users will enjoy having them. Since I am a avid supporter of the Delicious Generation, I do like the addition of the themes to make this otherwise plain app have some color.

Thanks for reading this post, if you have any comments, please post them below, and let me know what you think. I would also like to thank Connor Cimowsky for helping me edit this post.