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You’ll find Terminal in your Applications/Utilities folder. It’s through the Terminal that you access the command line interface of your Mac. In the same way that the graphical user interface (GUI) lets you operate your computer with a mouse, the command line interface (CLI) lets you operate your computer through typed commands. The graphical user interface is certainly easier to learn, but the command line interface can be very powerful! For instance, you can easily move a file to a new folder by dragging it with the mouse. But if you want to copy all the MP3 files anywhere in your Home folder, it’s must faster to use the command line, or Terminal. (You’ll learn how to do this.)

As long as you’re going to start using Terminal regularly, you might as well make it at home. You can drag the Terminal to your Dock for easy access. Also, you might want to change the look of Terminal by going to Window Settings in the Terminal menu. Switch the drop down menu to Color, then change the color to your liking. I personally like White on Black with a little transparency, but you can do whatever you like.

You might also want to switch to the Display menu and choose a different font and font size. When you’re done, click Use Settings as Defaults.

If you really want to get fancy, you can also access the command line interface through a 3rd party application like iTerm. iTerm adds some niceties that Terminal doesn’t have, such as tabbed windows. I know people that really like iTerm, but I personally just use Terminal.

Further reading:
Wikipedia: Terminal Application
Wikipedia: Text terminal
Wikipedia: Graphical user interface
Wikipedia: Command line interface

Is anything unclear? I’ll explain!

Posted in Definitions, Essentials, Mac, Unix |