Sometimes it is useful to have your terminal tabs in different colors. This helps a lot for example, when you are working on multiple ssh remote connections. In order to avoid confusion, it´s a good idea to give different servers a different background color - like green for "staging" and red for "production".

Setup the function

With some AppleScript you can change the terminal colors on the fly. Because this is something useful, i put the setTerminalColors function into my ~/.bash_login file to be able to access it everywhere:

function setTerminalColors {
    osascript \
        -e "tell application \"Terminal\"" \
        -e "tell selected tab of front window" \
        -e "set normal text color to $1" \
        -e "set background color to $2" \
        -e "end tell" \
        -e "end tell"
}

After saving and opening a new terminal tab, you can change the color easily. The first parameter is the text color and the second one is the background color of the terminal as RGB values:

setTerminalColors '{65535,65535,65535}' '{0,25700,0}'

Use it

The real advantage comes to light, when the setTerminalColors function is used together with other scripts or tools like Shuttle.

Shuttle configuration example:

"hosts": [
    {
        "name": "myserver.com",
        "cmd": "setTerminalColors '{65535,65535,65535}' '{0,25700,0}'; ssh myuser@myserver.com"
    },
]