You may also like Hyper, which is built with web technologies and therefore easy to customise with JS. iTerm is the most popular-it’s super configurable and has great performance. macOS’s Terminal.app is perfectly adequate, but it’s less configurable and modern than some alternatives. However the terminal stuff is specific to Macs since that’s what I use (sorry).įirst I recommend installing a better terminal emulator than the default. Most of the shell configuration applies to any operating system (since the shell is the same). Configuring your terminalĮnough history, let’s make our terminal useful. When you enter ls the shell interprets the command as “list the files in the current directory”, accesses the storage drive to read all the file names, then prints them to the terminal.Īll popular shells descend from a common ancestor, which is why most commands and syntax work whether you’re using Bash, Zsh or Fish.
The shell is what you interact with when you type commands into a terminal.
Terminal console text edit for mac os windows#
Nowadays most Unix-like operating systems use Bash or Zsh as their command-line shell (this includes Mac, Linux, and Windows if you’re using WSL). Terminals also have a shell-this is the set of commands and language features you can type to interact with the computer. For example you can think of Mac’s Finder & Dock or Windows’ Explorer & Start Menu as the graphical shell. This is the bit at the edges of the system that the user interacts with. Operating systems have what’s called a “shell” (often more than one). The default Terminal.app that comes with a Mac is an example of a terminal emulator. So computers came with “terminal emulator” programs that allowed the use of CLIs. If you know exactly what you want to do and the right commands to do it a text-based interface can be faster and more powerful. However although graphical interfaces were good at letting new users discover features, they were slower for experienced operators. These are known as Command-Line Interfaces (or CLIs).Įventually computers were small enough to fit under a desk, and came with GUIs. Operators would use a textual interface to enter commands and interact with programs and files on the computer. Way back before Graphical User Interfaces (or GUIs) were invented a terminal was a separate piece of hardware that let an operator interact with a computer that probably filled an entire separate room. This is because to a certain extent they are relics from the past. Using a terminal to control your computer feels unnatural and different at first.
Terminal console text edit for mac os free#
I got a little carried away here so feel free to skip this section if you’d rather get straight to the configuration. If you dump 200 cool aliases and plugins into your setup you won’t even remember most of them are there and they’ll never get used. This guide will keep things as minimal as possible-just setting up a few useful things. It can be overwhelming looking at power users’ configurations since they tend to have years of accumulated stuff, and little explanation for what everything does. As a developer you probably spend a large chunk of your day using it, so it’s a good idea to invest a little bit of time in making it look prettier and work more like a modern application. I mentor a lot of junior developers, and it makes me sad to see so many stuck with the ugly, hard-to-use default terminal setup their machine came with.
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