You navigate the Terminal by using arrow keys. You cannot use your keyboard and mouse to navigate the Terminal. Therefore it’s important that you learn a few things that you should keep in mind when learning the Terminal. Navigating the Terminal might not be as straightforward as navigating a GUI application. Here, you can customize the appearance of the Terminal including the background color, text color, and font. In the preferences menu, navigate to the Profiles tab. While on Terminal, navigate to ‘Terminal’ on the top bar and select Preferences.
Changing the theme of the Terminal lets you do just that. First, it’s best if you adjust the appearance to fit you.
Type in the word Terminal and click on the first suggestion.Įither of these two methods will bring up the Mac command prompt and it will look like a black box as below.ĭepending on your Terminal setting, the appearance may look different. Push command and space buttons together to bring up the Spotlight Search bar. In Finder, navigate to the location of the Terminal application which is:Īn alternate method is from Spotlight Search. There are several ways you can access Terminal. The Terminal application is in the Utilities folder in Applications. While you will not be a IT specialist right away by knowing your way around the Terminal, it’s the first step to becoming one - if that’s your goal. Once you grasp its basic functionality you can take on more complex tasks and when you do so, using the Terminal can be a lot of fun. It’s a quicker way of navigating the operating system, provided that you are familiar with the Terminal commands on Mac. While of course, it is not the case, knowing Mac Terminal commands will give you an upper hand in mastering the MacOS environment.Īs a Terminal emulator, it provides you with text-based access to the operating system. When using Terminal on Mac, it might look like you are trying to hack into a system. Apologies for this mistake.Some MacOS users might be intimidated by the Terminal and its commands. I must have copied some of the text and then mistakenly believed it was my own.
Update 8: A reader has pointed out this article is based on a similar article at†. Please let me know if there anything I can add to complete this piece.
I don’t think that this is very complete, but it worked for me and might help you to get your USB serial working. To quit the screen app, type control-A, then control. Knowing the serial port, you can just type screen portname datarate to show the serial data on the screen. For example, my list looks like this:Ĭrw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 4 Jan 25 07:32 tty.Bluetooth-ModemĬrw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 8 Jan 25 07:32 tty.Bluetooth-PDA-SyncĬrw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 10 Jan 25 09:20 tty.PL2303-0000103DĬrw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 0 Jan 25 07:32 tty.SerialPort-1Īnd I know /dev/tty.PL2303-0000103D is the USB-to-serial adaptor becuase it’s connected, if you unplug it the tty.PL2303-0000103D stops being listed.
I assume that you have installed the correct drivers from here.įirst, open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal). Check before you buy it that it has drivers. I bought a USB Serial port that had MAC drivers.