When I started at my current job at Taiste I got 15" Macbook Pro as my primary computer at work. As a long time Ubuntu user I was faced with series of problems, mainly due to differences in platforms. Package management is a pain I just have to live with, Emacs works almost out of the box as it should, but the terminal requires some heavy tweaking.

Available alternatives

OS X has few alternatives available. The system ships with Terminal.app, which has been redone for Snow Leopard (aka 10.6). It's decent, looks like a terminal, but has at least one minor and one major drawback. Minor drawback is the lack of proper color support (yes, I need colors in terminal). Terminal.app supports only 16 colors. 16, Six-teen. 70s called and they want their terminal back.

Major drawback is that you simply can't override cmd key functionality in any sane way to make it work as a Meta key in terminal. In practice, your forced to use ESC as Meta key, which just does not cut it.

Another option is iTerm2. Feels like the Swiss army knife of OS X terminals. Has load of configuration options, even supports, in latest versions, rebinding cmd keys as Meta keys! So after all it looks that even this milky white cloud has a silver lining.

But unfortunately, the iTerm2 also has a major drawback: If you rebind either of cmd keys as Meta, it wont let cmd+Tab (aka the Alt-Tab equivalent of OS X) go through to OS X level (Emacs knows how to do this, can't be that hard...). So basically you can't switch between applications with keyboard when using iTerm, unless you bind Option key to cmd, which makes option+tab switching possible, which on the other hand breaks every single option+key combo (like parenthesis)...

Back to the One That (Mostly) Works

I was a happy user of rxvt-unicode on Ubuntu, so I started searching if it would cut on OS X too. First caveat is that it needs to be run under X11, or XQuartz. I've been told that that's the final frontier no true OS X user wants to confront.

However, everything went smoother than expected. First thing was to install rxvt-unicode. I used homebrew for that:

  brew install urxvt

After compiling a while (binary packages, anyone?) rxvt-unicode got installed. Butt ugly as usual, but there it was. After configuring colors (see here for example) it was time to make it more Mac-compatible.

Copy & Paste

As every true programmer knows, when deadlines hit the tool that Gets Job Done is Copy & Paste. So it was essential to get copy & paste functionality in urxvt. I use a slightly modified clipboard script on urxvt to do the magic. It's available as a gist.

To get it working, you need to define it (and the shortcuts) in .Xdefaults with few lines:

  URxvt.perl-ext-common: macosx-clipboard
  URxvt*keysym.M-c: perl:macosx-clipboard:copy
  URxvt*keysym.M-v: perl:macosx-clipboard:paste

After this, I got traditional copy & paste with cmd-C and cmd-V in urxvt!

Opening urls

Bart Trojanowski's excellent mark-yank-urls comes to help with URLs. For OS X use, I've modified it a bit. In addition to the script, I use a custom applescript to launch URLs in background in Chrome:

  on run argv
    tell application "Google Chrome"
      set taburl to item 1 of argv
      set myTab to make new tab at end of tabs of window 1 with properties {URL:taburl}
    end tell
  end run

Applescript is launched via bash script (yo dawg!), which just calls osascript <path-to-applescript> argument. Next step is just to add this script and keybinding in .Xdefaults:

  URxvt.perl-ext: selection,mark-yank-urls
  URxvt.keysym.M-u: perl:mark-yank-urls:activate_mark_mode

After this, Meta-U goes to URL selection mode, C-p/C-n scroll through URLs, y yanks (that's copying, you lesser emacsers) and Return opens URLs in background in your Chrome.