The occasional scrivener

Update 2011-09-03: I’ve just gotten my hands on an iMac running Lion, and Terminal.app now has built-in support for different colour schemes. This blog entry has a nice one.

The Mac has strangely few terminal emulators, unless you set up X and invoke the Deep Ones in other ways. So far, I’ve found iTerm to be the best one.

You cannot set iTerm to use black background and white text, but you can trick this with AppleScript. Put the following into your .bash_profile or similar:

setColor() {
  osascript -e "tell application \"iTerm\"
    set current_terminal to (current terminal)
    tell current_terminal
      set current_session to (current session)
      tell current_session
      set background color to \"black\"
      set cursor color to \"white\"
      set foreground color to \"white\"
    end tell
  end tell
end tell"
}
## now invoke the function, and clear the screen 
setColor
clear

When you start a new window, the background will be white but it will soon become white on black, as ghod intended.

Thanks Jedrek for helping me with this!