Command line basics, Apple edition
The change from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X brought a lot of UNIX tools to Apple’s computers, like the scheduler called “cron” and the text editor called “vi,” which are accessible through the Terminal program.
In Terminal, rather than click on icons or buttons, you issue commands by typing them after a command prompt.
In the UNIX operating system, users have had several choices for command line prompt programs for decades. The command line programs are called “shells,” the most famous of which are probably bash and zsh.
Both bash and zsh are available in macOS, in Terminal; the former was the default shell in all versions of Mac OS X, the latter has been the default shell since macOS Catalina.
There are other shells you can use in macOS, you could even program your own if you really wanted to. But I’m only covering basics in this article, so I’ll limit the demonstrations in this article to zsh.
Most Mac users, including a lot of Xcode users, seem to be blissfully unaware of the Terminal. There are a lot of very good Mac and iPhone software developers who just don’t know how to use the Terminal.
And they might not need to. Unless maybe you find Xcode’s management of Git repositories to be more confusing than helpful. In that case, you might prefer to use Git on the…