I spend most of my day in the terminal doing one thing or another. While the default setting work pretty well on the Mac, it’s lacking while connecting to a remote system. Here are some of the tweaks I’ve made to make the terminal app more useful for me.

Not all systems know how to handle a terminal type of xterm-color. I did find a terminal definition for xterm-color and successfully applied it to AIX, but I’d rather not do that to all my systems. So, you can change the terminal type to xterm by default. Under Terminal Preferences -> Settings -> Advanced, change the “Declare terminal as” to xterm. You can also select dtterm (not as well supported on AIX, and not color) or several flavors of vtterm.