Several preference settings were dropped from iTunes 8 0 including the option for naming tracks on import without adding the track number to the front of the file name. Thankfully, Mac OSX Hints discovered that it’s not gone - only missing.

All you have to do is quit iTunes, then open the Terminal. Enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes create-filenames-with-tracknumber -bool FALSE

When you relaunch iTunes you’ll find that the track numbers are no longer added to the filenames when you import them.

Terminal has many hidden features and cool “easter eggs” buried within it. One of those is the ability to play Tetris within the Terminal window itself.

Update: this is actually part of the Gnu Emacs and is something you can do on any unix system that has Emacs on it.

To get to it all you have to do is:

1. Open Terminal
2. type: “emacs” - wait for the screen to load
3. hit “esc” then type “x”
4. type “tetris” in lowercase letters

A Tetris game will load in the window and you can play it by using the arrow keys to control the falling blocks.

Thanks to Sarah for sending this in! update: Looks like Sarah found it on TUAW.

Two settings that many users are missing in iTunes 8 are the ability to disable the Genre column when using the Browser, and the preference to disable teh link to the iTunes Store in your music library.

Luckily, macosxhints has already solved these problems - but it will require you to fire up the Terminal.

To remove the Genre column you need to launch the terminal and enter the following text:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

When you relaunch iTunes the Genre tab will be gone. If you want it back, repeat the process but replace FALSE with TRUE.

If you want to disable those iTunes store links you’ll need to enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

When you relaunch iTunes those links will be gone. Again, if you want them back, repeat the process and replace TRUE with FALSE.

I have a tendency to leave A LOT of Applications open at once, and I also leave a lot of windows open at the same time - so its really hard to tell which Apps I have hidden on my Dock.

There is a trick, however, to making this much easy to see. Plus, it looks really cool.

All you have to do to enable the Transparent Dock effect is open the Terminal and paste the following into the Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES

The reload the Dock by typing in the following:

killall Dock

Note that if you have any applications hidden already you may have to show them, then re-hide them before the effect will display properly.

If you want to disable this effect at anytime you can do so by opening the Terminal again and typing in the following:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool NO

Then reloading the Dock again.

While working in Finder, sometimes I need to jump to Terminal.app to perform a command.

To do this I generally:

• Launch the Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app)
• Type cd
• Then drag the little icon from the Finder toolbar on to the Terminal

This copies the current path from Finder in to the command line.

This works fine, but there are a couple of unnecessary steps here. Fortunately MacWorld points us to a good solution: Open Terminal Here.

Open Terminal Here is an AppleScript that opens the current Finder window in Terminal.app.

To install Open Terminal Here:

• Unzip
• Drag on to your Finder toolbar

Your done:

Now to open the current directory in Terminal.app, simply click the icon.

Another utility that does this is the similarly named OpenTerminal. With OpenTerminal you can add this to the right-click menu and more.

Also, to quickly open Finder to your Terminal’s directory type:

open .

Other things you can do include customizing the icon:

Or making Open Terminal Here create a new tab if Terminal.app is already running.

Reader Alex Hwang recently wrote in about GLTerminal, a Terminal.app replacement that recreates a terminal from 20 years ago.

GLTerminal accomplishes this by:

• Allowing you to change the screen brightness
• Allowing you to “curve” the text so that the edges wrap backwards
• Allowing you to make the screen flicker
• Emulating a baud rate for painfully slow speeds

While GLTerminal doesn’t have nearly as many features as Terminal.app–it’s strangely comforting. Something about using GLTerminal makes command line work much more enjoyable.

Leopard requires a special version, but everyone else should be fine with the default download.

Also remember you can full-screen GLTerminal with Command+Enter for the full effect.

A few months ago Travis wrote a great post on installing MacPorts. If you’ve never heard of MacPorts:

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

MacPorts makes it extremely easy to find and install tools.

As an example, let’s install wget.

First, we search by typing

port search wget

We can see here there are 3 packages that match wget. We want the one named wget in net/wget.

Let’s find out some more information before we install:

port info wget

We get the following package information:

wget 1.11.2, net/wget (Variants: universal, no_ssl)

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.

Library Dependencies: openssl, gettext

Platforms: darwin freebsd

Now to install we type:

sudo port install wget

You should see something like the output below. Ports will automatically install every dependency so your install times will vary.

Additional Commands

Update

sudo port update wget

Uninstall

sudo port uninstall wget

Update Packages: Retrieves the latest package information

sudo port selfupdate

Installed Packages: A current list of installed packages

sudo port installed

MacPorts are Great

Note: You should always exercise caution when using the sudo command. You can mess up your system if you don’t know what you’re doing.

MacPorts is a great solution for installing common Mac applications and utilities. It’s much more efficient and works quite well. One downside is MacPorts doesn’t have as extensive collection as say FreeBSD Ports, so there are some holes.

Also, the ports are often a release or two behind (Firefox is at 2.0)–so don’t expect the latest version for many of these packages. For the most part these are known stable releases.

If you’re not comfortable with the terminal, there is a GUI solution Porticus. I haven’t tried it, so I would use at your own risk.

What are your favorite MacPorts packages?

Mine are wget and lynx.

I perform a lot of domain whois lookups. If I have an idea for a domain and want to check its availability, I generally do a search for domain whois and then lookup my domain with one of the listings.

There’s nothing wrong with this process, but with Quicksilver we can improve any task we do regularly.

Creating a Domain Whois Bookmark in Quicksilver

One great way is by creating a bookmark of the domain whois site, with the search query as ***. We would do this for a site like DomainTools like this: http://whois.domaintools.com/***

You can see below I have created two boomarks, one for whois and one for IMDB.

You also need to enable the “Web Search Module” in Quicksilver Plugins and restart Quicksilver to enable it.

Now, to use this you would invoke Quicksilver (Command+Space). Press Command+R to refresh the index if you didn’t restart.

Type the name of your bookmark, in our case “whois” and press tab. The action should be “Search For…”, followed by a textfield. Enter the domain lookup and press enter. It should look something like this:

And then:

There’s another way to accomplish this though.

Domain Whois Through Terminal and Quicksilver

If you look at the image above of the Quicksilver plugins, you’ll notice I also have the Terminal Module enabled. This plugin lets you run Terminal commands directly from Quicksilver.

This is a much quicker method because you don’t need to load a web browser–only a terminal.

The workflow for this is Command+Space (invoke Quicksilver), Enter “.whois mactips.org”–note the period before the whois. Press tab and start typing “terminal” and the “Run a Text Command in Terminal” action will appear:

Hit enter and you have your whois:

The period before the “.whois mactips.org” enables a textbox field–so you can enter data and pass it to applications. We’ll dive into this more in the future.

There you have it, two easy ways to perform a domain whois.

The great part is you can do this with any command or bookmark. Search your favorite sites directly from Quicksilver or have easy access to the terminal.

On any given day, my desktop is filled with screenshots and images I’ve saved while writing tips. Often my desktop looks like the following:

There are a couple of methods to get around saving images to the desktop–including saving them to the clipboard–but I actually really like this method.

I have my bottom right corner of my screen set to show the desktop, so while writing a post I mouse over–grab whichever image I need and jump back into Ecto. The whole process takes about 2 seconds–it makes me extremely productive while writing tips.

But when things get cluttered, I spend extra time searching for an image. Not to mention it looks ugly having so many icons on the desktop.

This is where a quick bash script paired with Quicksilver comes to the rescue.

Note: This will overwrite any old files inside ~/Documents/Backup.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir ~/Documents/Backup
mv ~/Desktop/* ~/Documents/Backup

This creates a directory inside your Documents folder named Backup and moves all the files from your desktop to that folder. I’m sure there’s some error checking that could help this script, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible.

Save this script somewhere you can access it like your home directory called clean-desktop.sh.

Launch quicksilver and type the name of your script. You may have to press Command+R to rescan your catalog.

Press enter and voila. Now you’re only a few keystrokes away from cleaning up your desktop.

Alternatively you could use the Quicksilver Terminal plugin to run this command directly from terminal, but I like having a script with an easy name.

This is just awesome. I was stumbling around Google Code looking for something interesting to write about when I came across blacktree-visor–innocently tagged as a Quake-style terminal.

That line grabbed my intention and I decided to see what Visor was all about.

Visor is an application that attaches the Terminal to the top of your screen for easy access. If you’ve ever played a game with a console (Like Quake) this should be very familiar to you. You can perform any command as usual. The only difference is the way the terminal is presented.

This project is from blacktree, the same person who developed other amazing applications such as Quicksilver, Telekinesis and Secrets.

Installing Visor

To install Visor you must have SIMBL installed.

Once you’ve done this copy Visor.bundle into /Users/<username>/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/

Be sure to replace <username> with your username.

Start Terminal.app (Applications -> Terminal.app) or re-start if it’s already open.

In your menu, click Terminal -> Visor Preferences…

This brings up a simple configuration window for Visor.

Configuring Visor

First set the HotKey. Press Edit and enter the key combination you’d like to use. I’m using Control+` (Control+Tilde).

You can also adjust the Slide/Fade Window settings to change the transition effects.

That’s all you need to get started. Close the window and press your HotKey.

You should get a nice Quake-like Terminal window at the top of your screen.

I’ve edited my Terminal settings to be skinnier so it doesn’t take up as much room.

(Note: If you’re having problems making your changes stick, click Shell -> Use Settings as Default.)

If you use your terminal at all this is extremely handy as a quick way to access it from any application.

I’ve already used this a couple times while writing this tip!

What I found even cooler was that you could add Quartz Animations to your background.

Re-open the Visor Preferences–you’ll notice a Use Quartz Animation setting.

Head over to QuartzCompositions and download any of the listed animations (I like this one). Load this file as your background in Visor and you’ve got a cool animation running while you work in Terminal.app.

I found this a little distracting while using a transparent background. However, if you enable the “Fade Window” setting–the animation only shows up while showing/hiding the terminal window.

This adds an extremely cool effect that looks great during the transition of your console. Make sure your window is opaque (Terminal -> Preferences -> Settings -> Background).

Here is a quick video demonstrating Visor and the Quartz Animation transition.

(Note: E-mail subscribers will have to click through to see this video)

Visor is Awesome

I’m already in love with Visor. I don’t use my terminal a ton but I use it enough for this to increase my productivity.

Not only does it work well, but it looks amazing.

I’ve noticed we’ve used the word awesome quite a bit when describing blacktree software. This is because the ideas are somewhat simple, but executed beautifully.

If you use your terminal at least once a day, I highly recommend Visor.

There is a version for Tiger, however I haven’t tested it.