Recently I upgraded my blog here and lost permalinks to several articles, as well as the articles themselves. For that I apologize, if you are looking for something unfound. One such article that I referred to often was ‘Scripting Mac Terminal Using Ruby’. Though this is not the original article, here is a script I recently needed. As will all source code published herein, this is hereby released into the public domain with no warranties of any kind.
This humble little script uses rb-appscript, to change the background color, in Terminal, of the current tab you are running. I like to change colors of tabs to mean different things. For instance, where I am tailing log files – dark green… running irb – dark blue, etc.
Maybe, like me, you stay logged into several machines around the world and want to color-code your tabs based on location.
I called mine colorme.rb. The command line expects a color in this format:
- array: [0,32767,65535] of color values [Red, Green, Blue], 0 to 65535
- string: ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘black’, etc., only the basic colors work as strings
Have fun and let me know if you are doing something interesting with Terminal using Appscript on Ruby.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'
include Appscript
_color = (ARGV.length > 0) ? ARGV[0] : 'black'
begin
term = app('Terminal')
current_window = term.windows.first
tab = current_window.tabs.first
current_color = tab.background_color.get
puts "Current Color is: #{current_color.inspect}"
tab.background_color.set(_color)
rescue Exception => e
puts "#{e}"
puts "Usage: colorme.rb array"
puts " ...where array is an array of 3 color values like this [0,32767,65535]"
puts " ...values can be anywhere between 0 and 65535"
puts " ...values, in order, represent 'Red, Green Blue'"
end
Have you ever wanted to look at the call stack without raising an exception to do it?
caller.each {|c| puts c}