The default user environment on OS X is not exactly very productive. On my Linux and FreeBSD systems I prefer to work in a highly customized user environment that allows me to work faster and more efficiently. I have tried numerous ways of accomplishing this; customizing bash, using alternate shells such as zsh and yet, none of these options provided me with what I was looking for. I was exploring the net with StumbleUpon and came across tcshrc, a set of tcsh configuration files that provides you with a customized and highly capable shell environment. On OS X, it took a few modifications to the scripts to work as I expected it; on FreeBSD and Linux they worked great out of the box.

After installation in OS X, you’ll notice the ls command doesn’t work — it throws an error about invalid options. The scripts include in .tcshrc.aliases a line that reads “ls –color”. OS X doesn’t have terminal colors supported by default, so you need to remove the –color flag.

The second thing that didn’t work quite the way I wanted was my backspace key behavior. In .tcsh.bindkeys look for the darwin case in the $ostype switch and then find the line that reads ‘bindkey ^? delete-char’. You need to either comment that out or delete that line if you want your backspace key to function as normal; else you have to use ^H (Ctrl+H) to backspace.