Pretty Mac OS

I just recently had the opportunity to sit with Aaron Nelson and go through some really cool Powershell features, and I’m certainly going to spend time getting to know Powershell a lot better. If you didn’t know, Powershell isn’t exclusive to Windows anymore – you can actually run a basic set of Powershell features, called Powershell Core, on Mac OS and Linux as well.

But there’s a problem.

Mac OS X, X on behalf of the Roman numeral for 10, was the successor to Mac OS 9 (released in 1999) and its first version released was Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, followed with Mac OS X v10.0 'Cheetah' in 2001. Former releases of OS X were named after big cats, such as OS X v10.8 referred to as 'Mountain Lion'. Downloaded the iso image and proceeded to make a Mac OS X bootable USB on windows. To create a bootable media to install Mac OS X leopard on my old macbook A1181. I used imageusb and installed. I was very happy to find this 10.5.4 version which worked perfectly. Many thanks to all.

By default, running the “pwsh” command just starts Powershell Core in a regular terminal window. The first thing you’ll notice is that this doesn’t really play well if you’re using a white background, as the output is often light grey, yellow or even white.

So wouldn’t it be cool if we could launch our Powershell Core in the stylish blue world of bliss that Windows users have become so accustomed to?

Pretty

Setting up a color profile

You probably already know that you can customize the Mac Terminal to death, and you may even have noticed that you can create different profiles for different purposes:

What you can do is, you can create a separate profile for your Powershell Core stuff, customize all those colors, fonts, and what-not. But here’s where it gets funkier:

Pretty Mc Shaders

You can set a custom command to start when you open a terminal window with this profile: enter pwsh in the “Run command” field at the top, and now, every time you open a window with this profile, it starts Powershell Core automatically, saving you all of five keystrokes.

The “Run inside shell” checkbox needs to be enabled!

In fact, you may even want to put “pwsh; exit” (without the quotes) in the “Run command” field – this will terminate the bash shell automatically when the pwsh process ends, so typing “exit” in Powershell will close the window.

Another slight annoyance is that when you want to close the window, technically the “pwsh” process is still running (unless you type “exit”), so you’ll get a friendly confirmation dialog that you’ll have to deal with:

To make this window go away, and save you another five keystrokes, look at the bottom of the “Shell” tab of the “Preferences” window, in the “Ask when closing” section. If you add “pwsh” to that list of applications, the terminal won’t ask you for confirmation if you want to close the window.

Obviously, that warning is there for a reason, so it’s really your call if you want to do this.

The result

Now, when you open Terminal, you can select “New Window” -> “Powershell” from the “Shell” menu…

… and voilà:

It was two decades ago to the day—March 24, 2001—that Mac OS X first became available to users the world over. We're not always big on empty sentimentality here at Ars, but the milestone seemed worthy of a quick note.

Of course, Mac OS X (or macOS 10 as it was later known) didn't quite survive to its 20th birthday; last year's macOS Big Sur update brought the version number up to 11, ending the reign of X.

But despite its double life on x86 and ARM processors and its increasingly close ties to iOS and iPadOS, today's macOS is still very much a direct descendant of that original Mac OS X release. Mac OS X, in turn, evolved in part from Steve Jobs' NeXT operating system—which had recently been acquired by Apple—and its launch was the harbinger of the second Jobs era at Apple.

Cheetah, Mac OS X's initial release, was pretty buggy. But it introduced a number of things that are still present in the operating system today. Those included the dock, which—despite some refinements and added features—is still fundamentally the same now as it ever was, as well as the modern version of Finder. And while macOS has seen a number of UI and design tweaks that have changed over time, the footprints of Cheetah's much-hyped Aqua interface can still be found all over Big Sur.

Pretty Mac Os X

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Pretty Masks Masquerade Ball

OS X brought many new features and technologies we now take for granted, too. For example, it enabled Apple's laptops to wake up from sleep immediately, and it introduced dynamic memory management, among other things.

Mac OS X's greatest impact in retrospect may be in the role it had in inspiring and propping up iOS, which has far surpassed macOS as Apple's most widely used operating system. And indeed, macOS lives in a very different context today than it did in 2001. It was recently bumped from the No.2 operating system spot globally by Google's Chrome OS, ending a very long run for Mac OS as the world's second-most popular desktop operating system in terms of units shipped.

The most popular desktop operating system in 2021 is Windows, just as it was in 2001, but the most popular OS overall is Google's Android, which has dramatically larger market share in the mobile space than iOS does.

So while Mac OS X's influence is profound, it exists today primarily as a support for iOS, which is also itself not the most popular OS in its category. Despite Apple's resounding success in the second Steve Jobs era, as well as in the recent Tim Cook era, the Mac is still a relatively niche platform—beloved by some, but skipped by much of the mainstream.

After 20 years, a lot has changed, but a whole lot has stayed the same.