macos-terminal-themes: Color Schemes for macOS Terminal.app

What macos-terminal-themes Does and Who It Is For

macos-terminal-themes is a curated set of color profile files for the Terminal.app application that ships with macOS. The repository was originally created by porting themes from the iTerm2 color scheme collection maintained by mbadolato. Each theme defines a complete color scheme: background, foreground, and the sixteen ANSI palette colors that terminals use to display colored text in shells, editors, and command-line tools. The target audience is macOS developers and power users who prefer to stick with the built-in Terminal.app rather than installing a third-party terminal emulator, but who want a more visually appealing color scheme than the default options that macOS provides. The README notes that the default themes shipped with macOS (Pro, Basic, Grass, and similar) are deliberately excluded from this collection, since every macOS installation already has them.

How .terminal Files Work

macOS Terminal.app stores color profiles as .terminal files, which are XML property list documents. Each file encodes the full configuration for a terminal profile: background and foreground colors, cursor color, bold color, the eight standard and eight bright ANSI colors, text encoding, font, and scroll behavior. When imported, a .terminal file creates a new entry in Terminal.app's profile list that persists between sessions.

Terminal.app's color display depends on the shell reporting correct ANSI escape codes for color output. The README links to a GitHub issue comment that explains how to enable color formatting in the shell, which is a prerequisite before a color theme has any visible effect on shell output. Without shell color formatting enabled, importing a theme changes the terminal background and text color but has no effect on how tools like ls, git, or a syntax-highlighted editor display their output.

Installing a Theme: Two Methods

The README documents two ways to install a theme from the themes/ directory.

The first method uses the Terminal settings panel. Open Terminal, then go to Terminal > Settings > Profiles (or press cmd+,). Click the ... menu at the bottom of the profile list, choose Import, and select a .terminal file from the themes/ folder. After importing, keep the profile selected and click Default to make it the active profile for new windows. Open a new window with cmd+N to see the theme applied.

The second method is to double-click a .terminal file directly in Finder. This opens a new Terminal window using that theme immediately. To make it permanent, go to Shell > Use Settings as Default from the menu. The README warns that macOS quarantines files downloaded from the internet, which can cause a security warning when double-clicking a downloaded .terminal file. The workaround is to right-click the file and choose Open instead of double-clicking, or to use the settings import method, which bypasses the quarantine dialog.

Theme Coverage and the screenshots/ Directory

The themes/ directory contains a large set of named themes. The README lists them alphabetically with download links and paired screenshots. A sampling of the named themes includes: 3024 Day, 3024 Night, AdventureTime, Afterglow, Alabaster, AlienBlood, Alucard, Argonaut, Arthur, AtelierSulphurpool, Atom, Atom One Light, Ayu, Ayu Light, Ayu Mirage, Batman, Belafonte Day, Belafonte Night, Bifrost, BirdsOfParadise, Blazer, Borland, Bright Lights, Broadcast, Brogrammer, C64, Cobalt2, Cobalt Neon, Chalice, Chalk, Chalkboard, CLRS, CrayonPonyFish, Dark Pastel, Darkside, Desert, DimmedMonokai, Dracula, Duotone Dark, Earthsong, and many more continuing alphabetically. The screenshots/ directory holds a preview image for each theme. This visual index is the primary way to browse the collection and choose a theme before installing it. The README shows all screenshots inline, which makes the document quite long but allows side-by-side visual comparison.

macOS Quarantine: The Security Warning and How to Bypass It

macOS applies a quarantine flag to files downloaded from the internet. When a user double-clicks a quarantined .terminal file, macOS may display a security warning or refuse to open the file entirely. This is not a problem with the themes themselves but with the macOS Gatekeeper security mechanism applied to any file downloaded from a web browser or a zip archive.

The README gives two solutions. The first is to right-click the file and choose Open from the context menu, which presents a dialog asking for confirmation and then proceeds. The second is to use the settings import method described in Terminal > Settings > Profiles > Import, which does not trigger the quarantine dialog because Terminal handles the import through its own settings flow rather than launching the file directly. For users installing many themes at once, the import method is more practical since it avoids the right-click confirmation step for each file.

Limitations: Terminal.app Only, No Tools/ Output for New Themes

The collection works only with macOS Terminal.app. It is not compatible with iTerm2 (which uses a different .itermcolors format), Alacritty (which uses TOML or YAML config), kitty (which uses its own .conf format), or any other terminal emulator. Each terminal application uses its own configuration format, so a theme from this repository cannot be used directly in any application other than Terminal.app.

The repository has no declared license. There is no LICENSE file in the root. This is relevant for anyone who wants to include themes from this collection in another project, a macOS configuration manager, or a derived theme pack. The README encourages contributions and points to CONTRIBUTING.md for the steps and tools that generate the preview screenshots, but the absence of an explicit license means the legal basis for redistribution is unclear.

The tools/ directory mentioned in the repository layout presumably contains the scripts that generate the preview screenshots, but the README does not document what the tools do or how to run them.

macos-terminal-themes versus iTerm2 for macOS Color Customization

iTerm2 is a third-party terminal emulator for macOS that replaces Terminal.app entirely. It is widely used among developers for its additional features: split panes, extensive keyboard shortcut customization, tmux integration, Growl notifications, and a profile system that allows much more configuration than Terminal.app supports. iTerm2 maintains its own color scheme library through the itermcolors format and the companion mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes repository, which is the upstream source for many themes in macos-terminal-themes.

The practical choice between them depends on whether the developer wants to stay with the default macOS terminal or switch to a third-party application. macos-terminal-themes is the right approach when the developer wants to improve Terminal.app's appearance without the overhead of installing and configuring a replacement application. iTerm2 is the right choice when the developer wants features that Terminal.app does not provide. Since macos-terminal-themes is a direct port of iTerm2 themes, switching to iTerm2 later does not mean losing access to the same color schemes; the original files are available in the iTerm2 format from the upstream repository.

Editorial conclusion

macos-terminal-themes is the right resource for macOS developers who want to change Terminal.app's default appearance without switching to a third-party terminal emulator. The repository has no license, which is a consideration for anyone who wants to redistribute themes or include them in another project. For developers who want a more feature-rich terminal with native support for themes, iTerm2 is the direct alternative and hosts the original version of most of the themes in this collection.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. lysyi3m/macos-terminal-themes on GitHub
3. README