The Terminal app is in the Utilities folder in Applications. To open it, either open your Applications folder, then open Utilities and double-click on Terminal, or press Command - spacebar to launch Spotlight and type 'Terminal,' then double-click the search result. You’ll see a small window with a white background open on your desktop. Make Terminal windows stand out with profiles. When you’re logged in to several servers, unique background colors and window titles specified in profiles help you easily spot the right Terminal window. Use profiles built into Terminal, or create your own custom profiles. How to create profiles for Terminal windows. The Terminal application is in the Utilities folder in Applications. There are several ways you can access Terminal. In Finder, navigate to the location of the Terminal application which is: Applications Utilities Terminal. How to Open a Terminal Window in Mac. This wikiHow teaches you how to open the Terminal utility on Mac, which provides Mac users with a way to access and adjust settings of the operating system with text-based commands. To open Terminal on your Mac, do a spotlight search for the Terminal by pressing the Command + Space keys on your Mac keyboard and searching for Terminal in Spotlight Search. (See image below) 2. Next double click on the Terminal option or press the enter key on your Mac’s keyboard to open up Terminal.
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Terminal is a Mac application most don't use, and it's understandable why you may open it up and close it quickly. It doesn't look like any other app on your Mac; users who aren’t sure what Terminal does will be befuddled by its plain interface and lack of buttons.
But Terminal is actually the most powerful app on your Mac – by a wide margin. It's not always easy to figure out, but knowing how to take full advantage of Terminal can yield huge results.
Here, we'll tell you what Terminal is, how to find Terminal on Mac, how to use Terminal on Mac, and discuss a few Terminal replacement apps that might make your experience a lot better.
What is Terminal?
Terminal is an app on your Mac that allows you to gain root-level access to your system. Think of it as the 'employee entrance' to your Mac; it lets you get backstage to change things as you see fit in what’s known as the command line.
All that power should come with a heavy warning, though. Terminal is fussy, and very literal. Unless you type in the right commands, it won’t do anything. Changes you make are not easily reversed, either. One fell keystroke can lead to disaster.
Some things can only be accomplished through Terminal, though, so it’s important to at least have a grasp on the basics.
How to open Terminal on Mac
There are plenty of ways to open Terminal Mac keeps locked away. Here are all the ways to access command line Mac services by opening Terminal:
Using Finder
Terminal is an app, but your Mac tucks it behind a folder called ‘Utilities’ along with other critical apps. Here’s how to discover Terminal on your Mac using Finder:
- Open Finder on your Mac
- Select “Applications” on the left side of the app window
- In the sub-menu, scroll down until you see “Utilities” and select it
- In the next sub-menu, click on Terminal
Follow these steps, and you’ll open up terminal and the command prompt Mac interface.
Opening Terminal through Spotlight
On your Mac open Terminal using Spotlight with these steps:
- Press Command + Space Bar on your Mac Keyboard
- Type in “Terminal”
- When you see Terminal in the Spotlight search list, click it to open the app
Open Terminal from Launchpad
You can also discover Terminal using your Mac’s app drawer, which is always accessible with a trackpad gesture. Here’s how to do it:
- Place your thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers on your Mac trackpad
- With all four fingers, pinch together to expose Launchpad (Note: This can also be done with all five fingers if this feels a bit clunky to you.)
- Search for Terminal at the top of Launchpad, or discover the app icon
- Click on Terminal
You’ll head straight into Terminal and your Mac’s command line interface.
Best Terminal Alternatives for Mac
Your Mac has over 1,200 features hidden in Terminal. You don’t have time to learn about each of them, but you’d probably like to see what these commands are all about. This is when MacPilot becomes a must-have app for your Mac.
MacPilot taps straight into Terminal, but adds familiar buttons and app interface features you’ve become accustomed to. It even breaks things into easily understood sections, like graphics, and debugging. The top bar in MacPilot segments Terminal commands as well, allowing you full granular control of your Mac by toggling checkboxes rather than entering commands into Finder.
There’s a seemingly endless number of things you can do with MacPilot, all more critical as you use find yourself using the Mac more often. You’re able to hide and reveal folders with a single click, or manage networks and port usage for your computer. You can even control whether your Mac wakes when not plugged in, if you really need to be mindful about battery life.
Many use Terminal to engage in an SSH (Secure Shell) environment for operating over unsecured networks. This is often to gain remote access to another computer, typically to gain access to Terminal on another computer.
It’s a fussy process made far less complex by Core Shell, a feature rich application for your Mac. Core Shell allows you to operate several SSH environments at one time, all of which can be uniquely color coded to for ease of use. Core Shell also supports drag and drop of files or folders for syncing to other Macs, and has a really handy download and upload monitor in the app so you can always monitor the progress of your file transfers.
As you familiarize yourself with Core Shell and begin using it for all your SSH needs, it learns your connections and offers a one-click way to log into a device remotely from within the app, and has automatic reconnection for lost connections.
Perhaps best of all, each connection can be customized to your liking with advanced options and settings.
Control your Mac with Ease
Terminal is sensational for controlling your Mac’s settings and buried features, but what about those times you just want more control over your Mac without toggling features and settings or opening up a specific app to perform tasks?
Your Mac’s dock is a great way to see apps you’ve pinned to it, but it’s still pretty basic. An app named uBar is now available to make your Dock far less simple by replacing it with something uniquely better.
uBar swaps your dock for a more iOS-like interface, though it’s still decidedly Mac. You’ll see apps represented as small icons that are abit more like widgets, with display bars for things like download progress, and smart notifications for how many emails or messages you’ve received.
You can still pin apps to uBar, but the interface for which apps are pinned and which are running is drastically different from the Mac dock. Where the standard Mac dock reserves most of its space for apps you have pinned, uBar keeps most of its space available for apps that are running, giving them the lion’s share of the space in your dock to display rich icons.
uBar also has a handy calendar feature on the bottom right corner, and supports multiple monitor setups. In a perfect Mac world, uBar is the perfect compliment to your menu bar.
And the perfect app to have in your menu bar is iStat Menus, which keeps a watchful eye on everything your Mac is doing, and surfaces data to you at a glance. You can get detailed information about storage or RAM, and discover why your network connection may be lagging. It even tells you which apps are dragging your system down.
If you like, iStat Menus will alert you via desktop notifications for just about anything you like. If your CPU load is higher than you like to see, or the battery is at a level you need to find a place to plug in, iStat Menus can alert you. Each alert is totally customizable, too; if you were working remotely, you may want to know when your battery is at 20 percent rather than the alert your Mac provides at five percent.
iStat Menus doesn’t need to be accessed to monitor your Mac, either. It lives in the background, and keeps tabs on everything without you having to worry about it. When you need details, iStat Menus has drop down menus in the menu bar itself, and each section has their own submenus that provide an endless amount of well-timed and impactful data.
Conclusion
Terminal is a powerful service allowing you access to the deepest points of your Mac, but chances are you don’t really need Terminal all the time. Most of the reasons people use Terminal can be solved with apps that provide the same access points with much less work.
This is why iStat menus, uBar, MacPilot, and Core Shell are so useful. Each has a unique use case, but they all make monitoring and accessing the deeper level features in Terminal much simpler and far more enjoyable.
Best of all, each is available for free during a seven day trial of Setapp, the world’s best suite of productivity apps for your Mac. Alongside these four apps, you’ll have immediate and unlimited access to nearly 200 other incredible apps within the Setapp catalog. No matter what you’re looking for, Setapp likely has an incredible app you’ll love.
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The Terminal app allows you to control your Mac using a command prompt. Why would you want to do that? Well, perhaps because you’re used to working on a command line in a Unix-based system and prefer to work that way. Terminal is a Mac command line interface. There are several advantages to using Terminal to accomplish some tasks — it’s usually quicker, for example. In order to use it, however, you’ll need to get to grips with its basic commands and functions. Once you’ve done that, you can dig deeper and learn more commands and use your Mac’s command prompt for more complex, as well as some fun, tasks.
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Download FreeHow to open Terminal on Mac
The Terminal app is in the Utilities folder in Applications. To open it, either open your Applications folder, then open Utilities and double-click on Terminal, or press Command - spacebar to launch Spotlight and type 'Terminal,' then double-click the search result.
You’ll see a small window with a white background open on your desktop. In the title bar are your username, the word 'bash' and the dimensions of the window in pixels. Bash stands for 'Bourne again shell'. There are a number of different shells that can run Unix commands, and on the Mac Bash is the one used by Terminal.
If you want to make the window bigger, click on the bottom right corner and drag it outwards. If you don’t like the black text on a white background, go to the Shell menu, choose New Window and select from the options in the list.
If Terminal feels complicated or you have issues with the set-up, let us tell you right away that there are alternatives. MacPilot allows to get access to over 1,200 macOS features without memorizing any commands. Basically, a third-party Terminal for Mac that acts like Finder.
For Mac monitoring features, try iStat Menus. The app collects data like CPU load, disk activity, network usage, and more — all of which accessible from your menu bar.
Basic Mac commands in Terminal
The quickest way to get to know Terminal and understand how it works is to start using it. But before we do that, it’s worth spending a little time getting to know how commands work. To run a command, you just type it at the cursor and hit Return to execute.
Every command is made up of three elements: the command itself, an argument which tells the command what resource it should operate on, and an option that modifies the output. So, for example, to move a file from one folder to another on your Mac, you’d use the move command 'mv' and then type the location of the file you want to move, including the file name and the location where you want to move it to.
Let’s try it.
- Type cd ~/Documentsthen and press Return to navigate to your Home folder.
- Type lsthen Return (you type Return after every command).
You should now see a list of all the files in your Documents folder — ls is the command for listing files.
To see a list of all the commands available in Terminal, hold down the Escape key and then press y when you see a question asking if you want to see all the possibilities. To see more commands, press Return.
Unix has its own built-in manual. So, to learn more about a command type man [name of command], where 'command' is the name of the command you want find out more about.
Terminal rules
There are a few things you need to bear in mind when you’re typing commands in Terminal, or any other command-line tool. How to find the apple tv app on mac. Firstly, every character matters, including spaces. So when you’re copying a command you see here, make sure you include the spaces and that characters are in the correct case.
You can’t use a mouse or trackpad in Terminal, but you can navigate using the arrow keys. If you want to re-run a command, tap the up arrow key until you reach it, then press Return. To interrupt a command that’s already running, type Control-C.
Commands are always executed in the current location. So, if you don’t specify a location in the command, it will run wherever you last moved to or where the last command was run. Use the cdcommand, followed by a directory path, like in Step 1 above, to specify the folder where you want a command to run.
There is another way to specify a location: go to the Finder, navigate to the file or folder you want and drag it onto the Terminal window, with the cursor at the point where you would have typed the path.
This makes a lot of difference as it keeps the software flexible yet powerful. Moreover, you can use its features like automatic crop tool, video tool, and bitrate calculator to customize your videos. You can also convert subtitles with OCR, which is available with VOB to SRT text format. A simple drag and drop can win your hearts.A free video converter for your Mac, ffmpegx is built on a smorgasbord of UNIX tools. Best mac app to convert url videos to mp4.
Here’s another example. This time, we’ll create a new folder inside your Documents directory and call it 'TerminalTest.'
- Open a Finder window and navigate to your Documents folder.
- Type cd and drag the Documents folder onto the Terminal window.
- Now, type mkdir 'TerminalTest'
Mac Terminal Commands
Go back to the Finder, open Text Edit and create a new file called 'TerminalTestFile.rtf'. Now save it to the TerminalTest folder in your Documents folder.
In the Terminal window, type cd ~/Documents/TerminalTest then Return. Now type lsand you should see 'TerminalTestFile' listed.
To change the name of the file, type this, pressing Return after every step:
- cd~/Documents/Terminal Test
- mv TerminalTestFile TerminalTestFile2.rtf
That will change the name of the file to 'TerminalTestFile2'. You can, of course, use any name you like. The mv command means 'move' and you can also use it to move files from one directory to another. In that case, you’d keep the file names the same, but specify another directory before typing the the second instance of the name, like this:
mv ~/Documents/TerminalTest TerminalTestFile.rtf ~/Documents/TerminalTest2 TerminalTestFile.rtf
Mac Os X Terminal App
More advanced Terminal commands
Terminal can be used for all sorts of different tasks. Some of them can be performed in the Finder, but are quicker in Terminal. Others access deep-rooted parts of macOS that aren’t accessible from the Finder without specialist applications. Here are a few examples.
Copy files from one folder to another
- In a Terminal window, type ditto [folder 1] [folder 1] where 'folder 1' is the folder that hosts the files and 'folder 2' is the folder you want to move them to.
- To see the files being copied in the Terminal window, type -v after the command.
Download files from the internet
You’ll need the URL of the file you want to download in order to use Terminal for this.
- cd ~/Downloads/
- curl -O [URL of file you want to download]
If you want to download the file to a directory other than your Downloads folder, replace ~/Downloads/ with the path to that folder, or drag it onto the Terminal window after you type the cd command.
Change the default location for screenshots
If you don’t want macOS to save screenshots to your Desktop when you press Command-Shift-3, you can change the default location in Terminal
- defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [path to folder where you want screenshots to be saved]
- Hit Return
- killall SystemUIServer
- Hit Return
Change the default file type for screenshots
By default, macOS saves screenshots as .png files. To change that to .jpg, do this:
Os X Terminal
- defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG
- Press Return
- killall SystemUIServer
- Press Return
Delete all files in a folder
The command used to delete, or remove, files in Terminal is rm. So, for example, if you wanted to remove a file in your Documents folder named 'oldfile.rtf' you’d use cd ~/Documents to go to your Documents folder then to delete the file. As it stands, that will delete the file without further intervention from you. If you want to confirm the file to be deleted, use -i as in rm -i oldfile.rtf
To delete all the files and sub-folders in a directory named 'oldfolder', the command is rm -R oldfolder and to confirm each file should be deleted, rm -iR oldfolder
Just because you can use Terminal to delete files on your Mac, doesn’t mean you should. It’s a relatively blunt instrument, deleting only those files and folders you specify.
Best Mac Terminal App
Another way to free up space
If your goal in removing files or folders is to free up space on your Mac, or to remove junk files that are causing your Mac to run slowly, it’s far better to use an app designed for the purpose. CleanMyMac X is one such app.
It will scan your Mac for files and recommend which ones you can delete safely, as well as telling you how much space you’ll save. And once you’ve decided which files to delete, you can get rid of them in a click. You can download CleanMyMac here.
As you can see, while Terminal may look scary and seem like it’s difficult to use, it really isn’t. The key is learning a few commands, such as those we’ve outlined above, and getting to know the syntax for those commands.
Terminal For Mac
However, you should be careful when using Terminal, it’s a powerful tool that has deep access to your Mac’s system files. Check commands by googling them if you’re not sure what they do. And if you need to delete files to save space, use an app like CleanMyMac X to do it. It’s much safer!