Terminal's Big AppleScript Bug

I've never been one of the people who's seen a need to use any terminal application in Mac OS X other than the one supplied by Apple in Utilities. It does the job, uses Monaco 9, doesn't anti-alias (or at least, can be made not to). It starts up in Mac-ish black on white, and generally Just Works.

10.5 saw a bit of an overhaul, with a much saner configuration interface (all in Preferences, rather than hidden in a rather baffling out-of-the-way inspector) and tabbed browsing. Now, I still don't use tabs on the Mac OS, personally; I like the established app/window split and don't see the need to bring a third level of indirection into play, especially when it doesn't even have consistent shortcuts. (Tabs on Windows? Now that's a different story.) In fact, for years I'd quite happily got by with a bunch of scripts in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Terminal/ that would neatly stack all the windows.

Sadly, the new version of Terminal also introduced an annoying AppleScript bug which renders these scripts less than useful. When positioning a window, the vertical positions aren't honoured correctly: instead, the window ends up 320 pixels up the screen from the desired location - OK if you want a window at the top, but certainly not if it's meant to be at the bottom right, which is my usual position. I mention this now because the bug in Terminal that broke my window arrangers will also affect a script to centre windows that TALlama (no really) posted in response to a lazytwitter invocation by John Siracusa. If you try to centre a Terminal window, it ends up jammed at the top of the screen, for no apparent reason.

Now, I'm not down with the cool kids who post radr:// URLs, so if anyone who's reading this is, it's really easy to replicate the error: get a Terminal window towards the bottom of the screen, run this script - which should do nothing, as it's merely putting the window back where it started - and watch your window shift around. Do that, report it, and hopefully eventually I'll be able to retire my "set voffset to 320 -- work around AppleScript bug" line.

tell application "Terminal"

    set b to bounds of window 1

    set bounds of window 1 to b

end tell

Anyway, thanks for listening, and here's hoping for a better Terminal AppleScript interface in 10.5.3.