.bash_profile madness on OSX

I ran into some issues setting up my terminal correctly on OSX. Namely, whenever I’d open a new tab on Terminal, my ~/.bashrc script didn’t get executed. So, I had no syntax highlighting, and I had none of my aliases.

It turns out that ~/.bashrc isn’t designed to be run for Terminal. This StackExchange answer has an explanation of why:

Why doesn’t .bashrc run automatically?

Terminal opens a login shell. So I followed their advice and sourced ~/.bashrc in ~/.bash_profile

Open a new terminal window in a script

Recently, I had to write a shell script to open two gnome-terminal windows, run a program in each, and keep both windows open. This stackoverflow thread was extremely helpful; I went with the second approach outlined in the top answer.