[Haskell-cafe] Re: Can't uninstall GHC or prepare SOE installation on OS X

[Wolfgang Thaller]

> Hi Wolfgang,
>
> For some reason, GHCi now keeps launching every time I launch  
> Terminal.app, I can't even get a regular command line prompt now. I  
> had to uninstall all the files for GHCi manually from an X11 Xterm  
> to get a regular prompt. It still gets an error trying to launch  
> GHCi, but then ends up with a regular prompt. I don't know why it  
> started doing that, it wasn't doing that before.

First, a classic Mac OS trick:  If an application misbehaves, delete  
its preferences file (in this case, ~/Library/Preferences/ 
com.apple.Terminal.plist).
Remmeber: uninstalling my GHCi package is never a solution. ;-)

I played around with Apple's Terminal a bit to find out what  
happened, and I've come to the conclusion that I can shift the blame  
to Apple:
Apparently, the command that is run when a terminal window is  
openened is one of the "settings" that the "Use Settings as Default"  
menu item (and the button in the "Terminal Inspector" window) refers to.
What's more, there seems to be no way to change this setting from the  
user interface. The only way I know of apart from deleting the  
preferences file is to open Script Editor and run the following script:
tell application "Terminal" to do script ""
.. which opens a new Terminal window without running a command. You  
can then use "Use Settings as Default" to restore everything to normal.

Cheers,

Wolfgang