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Mac OS X: setting background color of terminal in a shell script

I find it quite convenient to “cluster” terminal windows by their background colours.

In Mac OS X almost every application can be scripted with AppleScript. The following small shell script allows calls like setbgcolor 0xff 0 0 0x80 to get a red window with 50% transparency.

#!/bin/bash
a=$4
if [ -z "$a" ]; then
    a=0xff
fi

r=$[$1<<8]
g=$[$2<<8]
b=$[$3<<8]
a=$[$a<<8]

osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\"
    tell window frontmost
        set background color to {$r, $g, $b, $a}
    end tell
end tell
"

I also noted that, if the transparency is less than 0xa, you can click through the window.

Last modified 27.05.2004 11:21