MacMost: Terminal

Another choice for doing calculations on your Mac is to use the Basic Calculator app inside the Terminal. It has some features that neither the Calculator app, Spotlight nor Siri have like variables, history, customization and more.

While the Mac Finder handles zipping and unzipping files just fine, it fails to give you any way to see the contents of a ZIP file. You can use some Terminal commands to do this. Better still, you can use those Terminal commands in a Shortcut to make it easy.

Learn how to zip and unzip files on your Mac, including how to create password-protected ZIP files. It is easy to compress a single file or multiple files and folders into a ZIP file archive on your Mac. You can also decompress any ZIP file by simply double-clicking it. The Archive Utility is used invisibly for both commands, and there are some settings you can access. If you want to create password-protected ZIP files, you can do it with the Terminal.

Learn how to get random numbers on your Mac using the Calculator app, the Numbers app, Siri, the Terminal and a custom Shortcut.

If you suspect that you have some large duplicate files on your Mac, you can find them without any special software. You can use the Finder to search for files and sort them so duplicates are together. You can also use the Terminal to find duplicates with a multi-part command.

You can test your network speed on a Mac using speed test websites or a simple Terminal command in macOS Monterey. You can also easily put that Terminal command inside a Shortcut and then easily run a speed test from the Menu Bar any time you wish.

Every Mac user hears about the Terminal app from time-to-time. What is the Terminal and do you need to know how to use it? Take a quick look at the Terminal, how it works and why some Mac users need it, but most do not.

You can use the Terminal to list files and folders, restrict the lists to only large files and folders, and also just show the ones that use the most space.

If you have a list of items you need to sort, you can do it using what you have on your Mac or some free apps. Learn how to sort in Pages, Numbers, the Terminal, VIM, CotEditor and using a Shortcut.

If you need to create a random password outside of Safari or another password manager, you can use a variety of techniques. You can use the Keychain Access app, some Terminal commands, or even make your own Automator action to generate one on demand.

You can put your Mac to sleep many different ways including keyboard shortcuts, special gestures and interactions, an automatic timeout, and even Terminal or Automator scripts.

If you'd rather not use your own voice to narrate a video, you can use a Mac-generated synthesized voice instead. The best way to do it is to use a simple Terminal command to create the audio file and then bring that into iMovie.

You can work with text files using the Terminal and variety of commands and command line apps. You can merge files, search them, sort them, extract information and even edit them directly with Terminal text editors like vi and nano.

You can go to the Terminal and use simple one-line shell scripts to get various pieces of information such as the date and time, your Internet IP address and your Wi-Fi network name. Using Automator, you can incorporate these bits of information into a simple notification that appears whenever you press a keyboard shortcut.

If you prefer to type instead of using the mouse and cursor you can manage your files and folders with the Terminal. You can use commands to list, open, rename, move and delete files. You can do nearly everything that you can do in the Finder, and some commands are even more powerful.

You can share the screen of another Mac pretty easily. But it seems like it is impossible to do the same with another account on the same Mac. However, if you use Terminal to set up an ssh tunnel, you can share the screen of a second account using an alternate port number. This allows you to stay logged in to one account, while you use another account in a screen sharing window.

Most Mac Terminal commands posted online are actually simple commands that just change a preference for an app or part of macOS. When you use a command like "defaults write" all it is doing is editing a small preference file in your user Library folder. Take a look at what actually is changed.

An alternative to using Spotlight or the Finder to search for files is to use the Find command in the Terminal. You can search for files by name and refund the search by location, time and other factors. While not useful for everyday file searches, this could be used to search through large libraries of files for particular results.

You can peer into a zip archive and see which files are in there using the zipinfo Terminal command. You can refine the results to show you only the files with fgrep. You can take this same command and use it as a Shell Script in an Automator service for easy access. In this tutorial you'll also learn about using Shell Scripts with files as input arguments in Automator.

Shell scripts can be created in TextEdit and run in the Terminal app. In this example, we'll create a script that takes a single image and produces multiple versions of that image by looping through a series of sizes. This script can be used again and again to reproduce the image series when changes are made to the original.