It’s Snow Leopard day zero, so of course I had to upgrade. All in all, everything is great. (Especially the multiple monitor window migration fix!)

But the #1 thing that annoys me about all OS X releases in the colors in Terminal.app. They’re pretty much unusable on a dark background (especially the blue). For some time, there have been hacks to fix the problem. Well of course these hacks didn’t work on 10.6 anymore.

Never one to shy away from the problem, I dove in. And we have success!

Here’s how to make it work:

Find Terminal.app in Finder (/Applications/Utilities), right click, “Get Info”

There is a checkbox “Open in 32-bit mode”, Check it!

Install SIMBL. Plugsuit was installed on my machine before, it freaks out because of the 10.6 changes. SIMBL silently just works or doesn’t.

Get My updated TerminalColours SIMBL plugin. See the original post for details on how to install it.

Restart Terminal.app

Enjoy your readable colors!

This works because InputManagers still work in 32bit mode, but not 64bit mode. So by forcing Terminal.app to run in 32bit mode, SIMBL can still hook in. I just had to update TerminalColours to swizzle a new method that 10.6 uses to pick colors.

Hope you enjoy!

Update: I’ve changed the tar.gz download link to one that should work better.