Hi all,

My Terminal is awesome, has every detail just right (for me anyway), and now I'm setting up a few new macs around here and I have no idea whatsoever how to get their terminals to a pretty state. My user account is rather old, has been migrated over many OS X releases and machines, so my Terminal setup has grown rather organically over the years.

What I need is a recipe to start from scratch, so 1) I know what I've done, and 2) I can reproduce it anywhere.

Things I'm looking for:

• Full UTF8 support. Setting LC_*, displaying characters correctly, accepting input… I hear this got much easier in 10.5, maybe it all works out of the box now?
• Setup of OS X-style keyboard text navigation (option-arrows, etc)
• How you particularly handle meta-key support? (other than ESC'ing your way around)
• Other things to help our n00bs get around in the shell, such as:
  • List of useful default key bindings (^A, ^D, etc…)
  • Mac-specific .profile, .inputrc goodness
  • Mac-specific tools such as pbpaste & pbcopy, Open Terminal Here, etc
• If at all possible, a list of files to copy over to another machine that encompasses all the changes made to tune the Terminal. (dotrc files, plists, etc)
• And, well, anything else really. Just keep the scope on the Mac OS X Terminal application, rather than general unix setup and tools.

I think a collection of incomplete answers would be a good start. Post one or two things you remember having done, we'll vote them up, and after a few days I'll try to compile it all into a summary answer.