njbrown.com

My experience with the MacOS Terminal

How I started getting into coding

I remember the day someone first told me about Terminal. Well, I don’t remember what day it was, where I was, or who told me. But I do remember what they told me.

"If you want to do an internet speed test, you can open up this app called Terminal. Then just type in networkquality and hit enter."

If you have a Mac, try it. It just works. Isn't that incredible? It's way simpler than trying to open a website to run a speed test if your internet is slow. This was my first glimpse of how powerful Terminal could be. Despite its simple, almost intimidating, interface, I could use Terminal to do more than I would have ever imagined.

The next thing I remember, I had come home from school and wanted to show my dad the cool new trick I had just learned. I opened up Terminal and showed him networkquality. He was maybe impressed—I can't remember—but then he showed me something else he knew. Running cal outputs a calendar view of the current month and running cal {year} outputs a calendar view of the given year.

I was initially unimpressed. Why would I want to use cal if I could just Google "current calendar"? It took a couple of weeks to realize the efficiency of the cal command, though. From anywhere on my computer, I could consistently get the current month view within 1.5 seconds. How? Well, it only takes 10 keystrokes:

<CMD><SPACE> <t><e><r> <ENTER> <c><a><l> <ENTER>

Believe me. Once you have the 6-stroke muscle memory for opening Terminal, running commands like cal becomes extremely fast. But there's another benefit—cal always works. You don't need to click or zoom in on any images. You don't need a browser. You don't even need internet. Terminal just works.

I forgot about Terminal for a couple of weeks after cal. I was recording videos on my computer for some school project, and I wanted a way to consistently open the most recent OBS recording I had taken.

It turns out this is more tedious than you'd think. The best way I could figure out was to have a Finder window open on the Movies folder and wait for the most recent Movie to show up, then double-click it to open QuickTime Player. It wasn't that tedious, but it was annoying enough that I wanted to do it in Terminal. After 20 minutes of investigation, I had figured out a way:

open -a "QuickTime Player" ~/Movies/*(om[1])

Wonderful. I had no idea Terminal could be used for such practical purposes.

Now I could go on & on. I could tell you anecdotes about how who -b prints the last time someone rebooted their computer, how cp is absolutely wonderful for backing up important files, etc. etc. I could tell you about how I quickly learned all the base Unix commands: ls, cd, rm, mv, mkdir, touch, cat, pwd and how to use them effectively. I could.

But I'd rather encourage you to try out using Terminal yourself, even if it seems dumb or intimidating. I genuinely believe it's one of the best skills to learn in this modern computer age. Best case: you become very productive with Terminal and save many hours. Worst case: you're not very productive with Terminal, but you gain a reputation among your non-tech friends for being a 'hacker' and get to look cool while typing commands.