Apple's Terminal App Gets Colorful Redesign in macOS Tahoe

Not enough liquid glass, I can still read the texts?

If there is one thing I'd have really have liked to have seen with iPadOS 26 is Terminal - even if the session was chrooted and privileged commands were not possible. Just having access to basic Unix/Linux/GNU utilities would be incredibly useful for me as a sysadmin when accessing remote servers.

Part of my issue is I don't fully understand what "24-bit color and Powerline fonts" brings in the way of useful enhancements.

You can use this script to showcase the color support in the terminal:

awk -v term_cols="${width:-$(tput cols || echo 80)}" 'BEGIN{
s="/\";
for (colnum = 0; colnum<term_cols; colnum++) {
r = 255-(colnum*255/term_cols);
g = (colnum*510/term_cols);
b = (colnum*255/term_cols);
if (g>255) g = 510-g;
printf "3[48;2;%d;%d;%dm", r,g,b;
printf "3[38;2;%d;%d;%dm", 255-r,255-g,255-b;
printf "%s3[0m", substr(s,colnum%2+1,1);
}
printf "\n";
}'

This is the output on iTerm2:



This is on the default Terminal App:



Nice to have more colors available.

About "powerline fonts" I assume it's better support for Nerd Fonts, which use font characters to represent various otherwise "graphical" stuff. E.g. this is my NeoVim status line in iTerm2:



This is how it's represented in Terminal App:



Both use Meslo LGS Nerd Font Mono but the Terminal App seem to display some parts wrong.

macOS is like Linux unix based, so the terminals are similar (though still different).

Technically MacOS is an actual UNIX (actual, certified, UNIX), not Linux based :)

It's great to see developers at Apple put work into the CLI. Between this and Apple's new container tool (https://github.com/apple/container), the future continues to be bright for those of us who use command line tools on Macs.

You'll need to prise iTerm 2 out of my cold hands I'm afraid.