Ryan McGuire has a nice little post that describes how to enable the 256 colour display capabilities of terminal applications that support it. In short, make sure that an initialisation script like ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile contains:
export TERM=xterm-256color
To test, execute M-x list-colors-display in emacs.
On MacOS X one will need to install the ncurses package from macports. Unfortunately, the terminal emulator that ships with MacOS X – Apple’s Terminal.app – doesn’t support 256 colours; use iTerm.app instead.
Like GNU/Linux, MacOS X treats files with names that start with a dot as hidden files. While "power users" will have no trouble accessing these files using Terminal.app or iTerm.app , it is sometimes handy to have them displayed in the Finder. A case in point: I recently wanted to restore a dot-file from a Time Machine backup, but the file was hidden in the Time Machine Finder window.
With some command-line-fu one can configure Finder to display dot-files:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
$ killall Finder
To revert, simply flip the TRUE to a FALSE:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
$ killall Finder
