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Create a full-screen Terminal window Apps
Some purists like me will sometimes want their virtual Terminal to run full-screen. After using Mac OS X for over a year now, I simply could not stand to see the menubar that often anymore. I tried MenuShade, but I still had the titlebar, which was enough of a distraction for me. (Like I said, I'm a purist.) If I set my desktop and Terminal.app background to black and the text to dark blue, for example, the bright grey titlebar would ruin the effect. I tried zooming in using the built-in Accessibiliy option, but that was awkward.

So, my solution is to set up a GeekTool window that does nothing, and drape it from the top of the screen to the end of the Terminal.app title bar. Set it to the colour of your chosen background, and make sure it is set to always be on top. I found I had to get rid of the battery and speaker icons from the menubar, as they would otherwise show through.

I have my GeekTool window set to show the output of entering nothing on the command line every hour or so. You could have it read the file /dev/null instead, I guess. I personally use a black background with the text colour changing according to my mood, or the time of day, or whatever. I use a 80x26 window that takes up the whole of my 1024x768 iBook screen, since I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono set at whopping 21pt. This setup works well in combination with the utility screen, a nice alternative to having many shell windows open.

Since in this specific account, I have Terminal launch in place of Finder, I use it as a dedicated CLI session account. For working in Aqua, I'll use another account. It's like the >console login, only with your choice of colours, fonts, and the added bonus that it won't mess up your computer after five minutes.
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Create a full-screen Terminal window | 7 comments | Create New Account
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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: chris_on_hints on Jul 01, '05 12:19:25PM

Could you install X11 and set up a really simple window manager to run full screen? If you can use Terminal.app in place of Finder.app when you log in, why not use X11.app, which can be set to run full screen...

... if you install fink (fink.sourceforge.net) you can get a nice range of windowmanagers:

evilwm - which lets you have windows with a single pixel border. that pure enough for you?
http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/

also, icewm and windowmaker are nice and can be made to be very minimal... oh, and you get a wide choice of xterms to play with (aterm, eterm etc).

- one advantage of this method is that it would let you remain logged in to your aqua account and you can assign any hotkey to switch between aqua and X11



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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: adrianm on Jul 01, '05 02:37:28PM

What do you want a window manager for?
just script an xterm to run full screen and switch to full screen with opt+cmd+A.

Or if you are that desperate for purism, boot to single user mode :-)



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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: _merlin on Jul 03, '05 02:03:30AM

If you're a real purist, why don't you just log in a '>console' at the login window and have full-screen text mode? You save a lot of memory not having the window manager running.



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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: bigl00z3 on Jul 05, '05 07:13:32AM

the problems with the >console mode, are:
-that you have to disable fast user switching
-if you use a foreigner keayboard layout (Swiss-french for me) the layout stay in "US" (if anybody has a a way to change it I would love it as I really like the >console mode when I want just a text editor and run my laptop on battery power)

bigl00z3

---
-----------b!gl00z3-------------
--+++zw33t-m4l4x!ng-!m4g3r!+++--
-------www.bigloose.com---------
------info@bigloose.com---------



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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: vramin on Jul 03, '05 09:32:18AM

The menubar has been a pet peeve of mine since I first started using Macs in 1984. In fact, I hate it. Under OS X there is no justification, in my opinion, for locking out a portion of the screen except for novice users. It should be toggleable. I would pay a lot for a solid shareware add-on that allows removal of the menubar and lets its contents to be displayed at any clickpoint.



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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: vramin on Jul 03, '05 09:36:19AM

Maybe Apple just wants to make sure their icon is always visible.



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Create a full-screen Terminal window
Authored by: mpthree on Dec 17, '05 09:33:17AM

Do you got a screenshot of your little Geektool "hack"?



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