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How to blurminal your OS X Terminal

Mac

This tutorial will guide you through the steps to install and configure Blurminal, a SIMBL hack that allows you to ‘blur’ the background of Leopard’s Terminal.

terminal before blurminal is applied
before

terminal after blurminal is applied
after

  1. First up, you’ll need to download and install SIMBL, if you don’t have it installed already. The installation process is simple – you’ll click ‘next’ a few times and be done.
  2. Now download Blurminal and extract Blurminal.bundle to:

    /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/

  3. You’ll be prompted to enter your password in order to copy the file into the Plugins folder.
  4. Quit the Terminal (if it’s open) and re-launch it. Assuming you have some level of transparency set, the background should now be blurred.
  5. If you want to increase the level of blurriness, enter the following command in a Terminal:

    defaults write com.apple.Terminal ‘Blurminal Radius’ -float x.x

    where x.x is a number higher than 1.0 (which is the default level). Restart the Terminal and it’ll be even blurrier now :)

Posted in Mac.

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3 Responses

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  1. Dan Davidson says

    Does not work on my older G4 machine. Imagine this is because the plug-in uses core animation. I’ll try it out when I get a new MacBook Pro when they release the update to the MacBook family come October (we hope).

  2. Bob says

    How do you uninstall this if you don’t like it? I normally don’t like having plugins and things like that that can possibly slow down my computer. I do like a lot of eye candy though.

  3. pyrho says

    Awesome ! Works perfectly, and that’s way faster than iTerm !
    Thanks!

    @Bob, I suppose you just remove the Blurminal.bundle from /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/



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