Terminal for new Mac users: opening it, setting it up, and the commands worth knowing

Five minutes, no third-party anything: the video opens Terminal, changes how it looks, and walks through about twenty commands, most of which are the ones a new Mac user is told to run without being told what they do.

The first section saves the most time. Terminal is in Applications → Utilities, and the video shows three ways to get there — Spotlight with ⌘Space, a new Finder window with ⌘N and then navigating down, and ⌘⇧U, which jumps straight to the Utilities folder from wherever Finder happens to be. The third is the one worth remembering, because it lands you in the folder rather than making you walk to it.

Then bash and zsh. chsh -s /bin/zsh and chsh -s /bin/bash change the shell an account uses; each asks for the account password, and cat /etc/shells prints what is actually installed — on the Mac in the video, seven shells from /bin/bash to /bin/zsh. What the video does not spell out is that chsh affects new sessions, and that switching to bash visibly degrades the prompt: by the end of the section the prompt has fallen back to bash-3.2$, because bash does not read the zsh startup files. That is not a fault. It is what an unconfigured bash prompt looks like.

The commands are grouped the way a beginner needs them. date, cal and time for the clock. cd, pwd and cd ~ for moving around — and the point the video makes by accident, because its prompt prints the folder you are in, is that pwd is how you find out where a cd you did not mean has left you. mkdir and rmdir for folders; touch, open and rm for files, where open launches a file in whatever app owns it.

There is one instructive failure. The description lists mvdir dir1 dir2 among the folder commands, and on screen it returns bash: mvdir: command not found — mvdir is not a macOS command. The video moves on, which is the right instinct; mv is the one to reach for. The last section has the real power and the real risk: chflags hidden and chflags nohidden set and clear a file’s hidden attribute, rm on a directory fails with is a directory (which is what rmdir is for), and defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock wipes the Dock’s preferences and restarts it, resetting it to defaults. killall restarts any process by name, so the same pattern reaches well beyond the Dock.

None of this needs installing. If the question is which terminal to use rather than what to type in it, the best terminal emulators for Mac are a separate decision from the commands themselves.