Wednesday, November 26, 2003


A Mac OS X Hints article reveals that you can remove the scrollbar from a Terminal window. The hint specifically instructs you to save a .term file, then add the Scrollbar key with a value of False to the .term file.

As it turns out, most of the key/value pairs found in the .term file can also be written to Terminal's defaults database to cause the same setting to affect all windows.

So, you can go to a terminal window and issue the following command to disable scrollbars in all terminal windows.

defaults write com.apple.Terminal Scrollbar -bool False

Note that if you do this, you will need to force-quit terminal to ensure that it doesn't overwrite the manually written preference (most applications will synchronize their defaults back to the preferences file when quit -- force-quit'ing or kill -9 will bypass this).

Even without a scrollbar, you can still scroll the window using the page up/down, home, and end keys. If you have uControl (or something similar) installed, it can be used to scroll the window as if it had a scrollbar.

Neat.
1:09:22 PM  pontificate