Programatically Setting the XTerm Screen Size

This is a nice thing that works for any XTerm based terminal, in particular for Mac OS X's default terminal. To change the terminal window size from the command line, use a command of the following form:

echo -ne '\e[8;Y;Xt'

where X stands for the desired window width and Y stands for the desired window height. For example, to get an 80×50 terminal, you could use the following script:

#!/bin/sh
echo -ne '\e[8;50;80t'

or you could place this into an inline function, loaded in your .bashrc file or similar: <code> function ts {

  if [[ -n "$1"  &&  -n "$2" && $1 > 0 && $2 > 0 ]]; then
      echo -ne "\e[8;$2;$1t" 
  fi  

} function ts8025 {

  ts 80 25

} <code> You can also set the window size in pixels instead of characters if you prefer. Just replace the 8 in the above command with a 4, like:

echo -ne '\e[4;Ypix;Xpixt'