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Hiding Visor

Jon Yurek

An excellent little plugin, Visor is. You can have a Quake-style console that pops up whenever you want, in any app. Only trouble is that I wanted to be able to close Terminal.app and still have the Visor accessible. I found these directions linked off the Visor wiki to get rid of Terminal.app from the process list, which is a step in the right direction, but not perfect. There were some quirks that made the experience… iffy.

Here’s how to get Visor as it’s own, invisible, app, and still keep Terminal.app around like it always has been:

  1. Get SIMBL
  2. Get Visor
  3. Optionally, get TerminalColors, because the default blue in Terminal.app is horrible
  4. Install each.
  5. Make a copy of Terminal.app (I called mine VisorTerminal.app)
  6. Right click on it and Show Package Contents
  7. Open Contents/Info.plist with the Property List Editor
  8. Change CFBundleIdentifier from “com.apple.Terminal” to “com.apple.VisorTerminal”
  9. Add the key LSUIElement with a value of 0
  10. Save
  11. Find the Visor and TerminalColors plugins (they should be in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins)
  12. Open Visor’s Info.plist (Right-click > Show Package Contents > Contents > Info.plist)
  13. Change the SIMBLTargetApplications/0/BundleIdentifier value to “com.apple.VisorTerminal” and Save
  14. Open the Info.plist for TerminalColors (same as above)
  15. Select SIMBLTargetApplications and click New Child, change the type to “Dictionary”
  16. Add new children so that the keys and values mimic the existing one
  17. Make sure that one BundleIdentifier is “com.apple.Terminal” and the other is “com.apple.VisorTerminal”, and Save
  18. Get VisorStarter, unzip it and put it wherever you’d like (I have mine in /Applications/Utilities).
  19. Open Script Editor
  20. Open the VisorStarter app in the Script Editor
  21. Change Terminal to VisorTerminal
  22. Save
  23. Add VisorStarter to your startup items

Ok! That takes care of that. It’s a bit more involved than the other instructions, but will completely separate Terminal and the Visor. Trouble is, they’re completely separate. You’ll have to set up the fonts and colors all over again, but it shouldn’t be that big a problem. If you have trouble getting the window settings to appear, open the Visor preferences from the Visor menu and the Window Settings should come right along. And the best part is that if everything worked correctly (you may need to log out and back in or reboot) the ANSI Colors option should still be in both Terminal’s and Visor’s settings.