How to blurminal your OS X Terminal

by Ross McKillop on April 24, 2008

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 :)

Related Posts:
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  • An introduction to the OS X Terminal
  • How to kill a program or process in OS X
  • How to run Dashboard Widgets on your OS X Desktop
  • How to add a Recently Used Applications Stack to your Dock
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