The command line interface is an alternate method of interacting with macOS and Mac OS X, relying on text based command entry to execute commands and perform tasks. It is accessed on the Mac by using the Terminal application. Generally, the command line is considered advanced, and thus it’s usage tends to be more complex than many standard procedures on a Mac.
Ever wanted to download all photos from iCloud Photos using the command line? Thanks to the third party icloud_photos_downloader tool, you can do just that. Called icloudpd for short, it works to access and download photos directly from iCloud using the command line on a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux.
All Macs have a bundled SSH server that is disabled by default, but can be turned on at any time if you’d like to grant remote command line access to a machine. The SSH server in MacOS is turned on by using a sharing feature called Remote Login. With Remote Login enabled, the Mac now … Read More
Want to SSH into your Mac, from your iPad? SSH is pretty easy to setup, so if you’d like to have Terminal access of an iMac from an iPad Pro, for example, you’ll be up working in no time at all.
Occasionally, Mac users may notice that icons in the Finder of MacOS or the Dock of MacOS either display as generic icons, or the icons do not align with what they should (for example, seeing a generic document icon instead of a PDF thumbnail, or seeing a VLC icon instead of a zip archive icon, … Read More
SHA512 hashes are often used to determine data integrity, whether for matching a downloaded file to an original on a server, or for command output, or to make sure a file transfer was successful, or not tampered with. Checking a SHA512 hash is pretty easy on a Mac, thanks to bundled command line tools that … Read More
Ready to automate Mac app downloads and installs? If you’re setting up a new Mac, you probably know how tedious it is to manually navigate to a bunch of different developer websites, and to individually download and install all the Mac apps you may want. This is a necessary but time consuming procedure for setting … Read More
Are you noticing blurry text on your Mac’s display while navigating through the menu and across apps? More specifically, has this been an issue ever since you updated to macOS Monterey or Big Sur, and on a non-retina display? If so, chances are, font smoothing is enabled by default, and for some users they feel … Read More
If you are a Mac laptop user and you spend a lot of time at the command line, you may appreciate knowing that you can enable Low Power Mode on a Mac laptop through a terminal command. Enabling Low Power Mode through the command line on a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook is the … Read More
If you have attempted to use nano at the command line on MacOS recently, you may have noticed that the pico text editor is launched instead, via a symlink for /usr/bin/nano to pico. This is because the latest versions of MacOS remove the nano text editor from the command line for whatever reason, and instead … Read More
The Mac includes a command line interface to run and interact with Shortcuts app. This could be potentially useful to some macOS users who rely on the Shortcuts app for scripting and automation, and who spend a lot of time in the Terminal The currently available shortcuts command line flags include ‘run’, ‘list’, ‘view’, and … Read More
Have a bunch of Terminal windows open on your Mac that’d you like to merge into a single tabbed window? No problem, you can stop juggling several different terminal windows and get them all sorted out into a nice and easy to manage single tabbed window, thanks to a handy feature built into the Terminal … Read More
Python users on the Mac are likely aware that Python is being deprecated from macOS 12.3 onward, and will no longer be preinstalled on the Mac. But Python remains an incredibly popular programming language, and if you rely on Python you’ll likely want to continue to have Python available in macOS. It’s easy to get … Read More
Want a vertically split set of Terminals on the Mac, so that you can have two concurrent terminals running side by side for executing their own commands? Of course you do, this is a staple feature of many terminal apps for linux and unix command lines, so having this feature on the Mac is a … Read More
If you’d like to find comprehensive system information about a Mac, you’ll find the Terminal is an excellent way to retrieve this data quickly. We’ll provide a handy command that reveals extensive system information about a Mac, including the current system software version and build number, kernel version, boot volume, boot mode, computer name, active … Read More
Need to run a Terminal command as fast as possible? You can do so right from the Dock with this neat trick for Mac.
If you recently installed Oh My Zsh or updated a Mac running Oh My Zsh, you may encounter a large error message screen upon launching new terminal windows. The error usually states “Insecure completion-dependent directories detected”, and showing a series of /usr/local/share/zsh/ directories whose permissions zsh considers insecure. There are two choices to deal with … Read More
If you’re new to VI or VIM, the command line text editors, you may be wondering some of the basics, like how to save files, or how to both save and quit in vim in one fell swoop.
Need to check the sha256 hash of a file? You can easily check the SHA 256 checksum of any file in macOS from the command line. We’ll cover two different command line tools to verify a sha256 checksum on the Mac, and both come preinstalled with all modern versions of MacOS.
