Make Terminal.app start with a default set of windows

Due to recent circumstances, I’ve moved from my old MacBook Pro with Leopard to a newer, faster MacBook Pro with Tiger … but not soon enough to avoid addiction to the Leopard Terminal.app’s Window Groups feature, which allows you to position, size, and color any number of windows, make them a group, then have that group be what appears every time you start Terminal.app (back in my old 4Dwm days we called this “session management” … glad MacOS is catching up. ;)

Turns out there’s something similar in previous versions of Terminal.app, just not so nicely exposed. Setting up a particular startup configuration is pretty straightforward, though:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Open windows, put ‘em where you want ‘em, change their colors, etc.
3. Select “Save As…” from the File menu; you’ll see this dialog with different settings:

4. Change the settings to match the dialog above:

• Type any name you like in the “Save As:” field
• Change “What to save” to “All Windows”
• Check the “Open this file when Terminal starts up”

Note that by default it will save this file in ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal, which seems like a fine place for it to me but YMMV.