Make it easier to reset Visor's window height

Feb 16, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: itistoday

Visor (a recent Pick of the Week here on macosxhints) is a must-have enhancement for OS X's Terminal.app. It has has just one annoying bug: It will get bigger by one row each time you relaunch Terminal. To fix this problem, the developer suggests that you manually edit Terminal's plist file in ~/Library/Preferences. Here's a trick that will do this for you.

  1. Download (4KB) visor-fix. If you're afraid this program will blow up your computer, feel free to compile it yourself, as the source is included.
  2. Unzip the contents, cd into the visor-fix folder in Terminal, and then move the included visor program (it's universal) to ~/.visor using this command:
    prompt$ mv visor ~/.visor
  3. Add the following to your .bashrc (or whatever you use for your Terminal startup commands):
    resetvisor() {                                                                        
      defaults write com.apple.Terminal VisorTerminal -dict-add Rows 20                 
      ~/.visor &                                                                        
      killall Terminal                                                                  
    }
    Note: Replace the number 20 with whatever size you prefer Visor to have.
  4. Open a new Terminal window (so that the new .bashrc is loaded) and type resetvisor.
When you run resetvisor, Terminal should quit and relaunch with Visor now set to the desired size. It is necessary to kill the Terminal application because just quitting it will undo the changes to the preferences file. Just run this command whenever Visor becomes too big for its own good.

[robg adds: I tested this one, and it works as described.]

Comments (4)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070214223039729