Why doesn't .bashrc run automatically?

 put some alias commands in my .bashrc file, so that they might be loaded everytime I open a new Terminal window. Yet this doesn't happen.

I have to select run script: in the Terminal>Preferences>"MyDefaultTheme">Shell prefpane and add: source .bashrc && clear for it to work...

This seems odd since many tutorials only say you just have to add to the .bashrc file and all is good.

Been there, done that. What I came aware of, OS X doesn't read .bashrc file on bash start. Instead, it reads the following files (in the following order):

1. /etc/profile
2. ~/.bash_profile
3. ~/.bash_login
4. ~/.profile

See also Chris Johnsen's informative and useful comment:

By default, Terminal starts the shell via /usr/bin/login, which makes the shell a login shell. On every platform (not just Mac OS X) bash does not use .bashrc for login shells (only /etc/profile and the first of .bash_profile, .bash_login, .profile that exists and is readable). This is why "put source ~/.bashrc in your .bash_profile" is standard advice

I usually just put the things that I'd normally put in ~/.bashrc to ~/.profile — has worked so far like a charm.

However, this mean that my ~/.profile setups and aliases no longer got loaded! Lots of shortcuts disappeared. I thought they ran sequentially, not exclusively :-/

I added

. ~/.profile 

to ~/.bash_login to chain things as I expected.

Sourcing .profile in .bash_profile did it for me

echo 'source ~/.profile' >> ~/.bash_profile