10.7: Use Emoticons to distinguish shells

Sep 02, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: wiesmann

Now that Mac OS X supports Emoji, they can be added to the title of a terminal window to help distinguish shell windows.

One application that has been updated in Mac OS X Lion is the venerable Terminal.app which finally supports 256 colors. While playing around with Emoji characters, I realised they were quite useful to mark different terminals. I typically have multiple windows open with local and remote shells, along with a python interpreter. Previously I used the background colour of the terminal to distinguish the various contexts, but now I also add an relevant Emoji in the title.

To add the character to a Terminal window's title, just go into Terminal » Preferences, select the Settings Icon and the Window tab. In the Title item, you can enter the emoticon in the title text by going to Edit » Special Characters and select the Emoji set. Double-click the character you want to insert.

I posted some examples and an image on my blog.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. This did make me smile.]

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