Once you have it open, you should see something which looks like this: If you cannot find it, activate Spotlight search by pressing Command-Spacebar and search for Terminal. The terminal is located in your Applications folder within a subfolder called Utilities. It's a practical and functional tool to improve and enhance your daily interactions with your computer. Those are just a few of the reasons that the terminal is still a useful tool today. It is a very direct way of telling your computer what to do, whereas a GUI is akin to controlling the computer from a distance.The terminal is very flexible, and once you learn to use it, it is quite simple and straightforward.You can easily make changes to your computer's settings which would be tedious or even impossible to do using the user interface only.These include installing CocoaPods, using a git repository, and more. Certain things simply cannot be done without the command line (especially as a developer).
There are still several reasons that you should learn how to use the terminal if you are a developer, or even a user who cares about performance: Wasn't the whole point of graphical user interfaces to eliminate the need for a command line? Well, not really. This may be okay for the layperson, but as software developers, it's still crucial that we know how to use the terminal. Needing to run the computer through the command line helped users better understand what was going on inside their computer.Įver since GUIs became commonplace, we have almost forgotten about the command line, and the typical Mac user probably doesn't even know that it exists. A long time ago, before computers had graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the only way to operate a computer was through the command line. The terminal is an interface for you to execute text-based commands, and it gives you direct access to the underlying operating system, via a shell, on your Mac. In this post, we'll go over what the command line is, as well as some commands to get started using it.