Change the window background colour and image for Terminal
Learn how to make Terminal use a user-defined background image each time you open a new window.
A s you may or may not know, you can customize the background of a Terminal window in macos. You can use either a colour or an image, and you can also set a transparency level for the selected colour or image. You access these settings in the Terminal > Preferences screen; click the Profiles tab.
On the left, you’ll find a column of shell profiles, each using different
colour combinations. You can select one of those, or you can customize a profile. Click on a profile, and then in the main section of the window, you find the profile’s settings. To change the background colour, click the Colour & Effects button in the Background section. A colour picker window will pop up, and you can select the colour of your choice
If you want to use an image, click the pop-up menu next to the Image setting. When clicked, a Choose button appears, and then when you click on that, the file dialog appears. Navigate to the image you want to use, select it, and click the Open button. When you open a new window, the image will be in the background.
Here’s a trick: instead of selecting a particular image file, select a folder that contains a number of images and click Open. Now every time you open a new Terminal window (Command-n), Terminal will randomly display one of the selected images from the folder you specified. Whether you find this effect interesting, useful or distracting probably depends on the types of images you choose to place in the chosen folder.
But here’s one way to use this trick that might actually be useful – or at worst, not incredibly distracting. In your favourite image editor, create a new image with relatively tiny dimensions – say 20×20 pixels. Fill this image with a colour you’d like to use as a Terminal background, and save it to a ‘Terminal Colours’ folder (or whatever you’d care to call it) as a TIFF, PNG or JPEG (other formats probably work fine, too; these are the three I tested). Now change the fill to another colour you’d like to use for your background, and
save it as a new name to the same folder. Repeat until you have a nice assortment of background colours saved to that folder.
Switch to Terminal and repeat the steps to set an image as the window background. Select the Terminal Colours folder you made for your background images. Now, every time you open a new Terminal window, you’ll see one of your colour swatches as the background – Terminal automatically scales your tiny image to fill the Terminal’s screen. And while solid colours might not be as interesting to look at as fancy background images, they’re much less distracting to the eye – and not nearly as boring as using the same colour every time you open Terminal.
USE DRAG AND DROP TO TEST COLOURS
In macos, you can try different colours for your Terminal window by dragging and dropping colour swatches onto the window. To use drag and- drop, you need to get a colour picker on the screen. You can get one by clicking Terminal > Preferences > Profiles, and then click on any of the colour boxes next to Colour & Effects, Text, Bold Text, Selection, Cursor or any of the boxes under ANSI Colours. A colour picker window will appear.
To change the background colour, drag a colour swatch from the colour picker and drop it on the window. Repeat as necessary with varying colours until you have one you like.
However, any colour that you drag and drop does not change the setting permanently. To set the colour permanently, you have to go to the colour picker for Background: Colour & Effects in the Profiles settings and select the colour.