#Useful command prompt commands mac how to#
#Useful command prompt commands mac for mac#
#Useful command prompt commands mac install#
#Useful command prompt commands mac full#
#Useful command prompt commands mac free#

No wonder every list like this seems to include this otherwise useless tool.Your Mac comes with an app called Terminal under Applications > Utilities. You know what? That’s actually a fairly decent tutorial for learning the command line. For example, if you want a dragon to say “hello”, you can do that: You can make any of these creatures say your words by using the -f variable.

#Useful command prompt commands mac how to#

Here’s how to get a list of all supported creatures: You can actually get so much more than cows from this. Installing, once again, is easy with Homebrew. Type cowsay, followed by any sentence, and an ascii cow will say it back to you. Play With cowsay, Which Is Mandatoryįor some reason, no roundup of command prompt tools for beginners is complete without mention of cowsay. Run that, and your menu bar will switch color schemes. It’s a quick thing, sure, but someone with some scripting experience could put it to good use. Once installed, you can toggle your menu bar between dark mode and light mode with a simple command: dark-mode. This Terminal application lets you toggle that mode one and off quickly from the Terminal. Mac users have been able to turn their menu bar black for a while now, a feature called “Dark Mode”.

#Useful command prompt commands mac full#

Press “?” to see a full list of shortcuts. You can pick from among your stations using numbers, and keyboard shortcuts let you do things like skip tracks and love songs.

Launch pianobar and you’ll be asked for your Pandora account info, then you’re ready to rock.

#Useful command prompt commands mac install#

Pianobar streams Pandora to your computer with great keyboard shortcuts, without the big Flash-y site, and without commercials. Again, you can install with one command. Using the terminal to listen to music may seem like a gimmick, but it’s actually awesome.

#Useful command prompt commands mac free#

There’s a lot of power to unpack here, so feel free to dive in– check out our original guide for tons of useful info. Here at How-To Geek, for example, put a 1 pixel black border on our images, and I do it with this command:Ĭonvert -border 1x1 -bordercolor black testing.png result.png You can do a lot more than just convert files, too. For example, if you wanted to convert a file from a PNG to a JPG, you’d run: Now you can start using the application to do all sorts of things. First, install imagemagick using Homebrew:

#Useful command prompt commands mac for mac#

We’ve already explained how to convert and resize images with imagemagick in Linux, and everything works the same way for Mac users. For information on all this and more, check out the dockutil page on Github. You can also add applications, folders, and blank spaces. Just like that, you’ll see a Dock icon for launching Facebook. You’ll need to reset your dock for the new icon to show up:

-label lets me name the dock icon, which I’ve opted to call Facebook.

The URL following this tells the program which website I’d like to point to you can also point to applications or folders.

-add tells the program to add an icon.

Here’s how that command looks for Facebook: The tool can do many things, including add a dock icon for any website. We’ve shown you ways to customize your dock, but dockutil goes just a little bit further, and is quick to install. The program is quite powerful once you learn it, so dive in. If you need some help learning what characters to use, just type help intro and read the resulting tutorial. Launch calc and you can start typing equations, as shown in the screenshot. Turn your Terminal into a complete calculator by installing: This application probably isn’t one you’ll use every day, but could be awesome if you’ve set up GeekTool to customize your desktop. You can read more details on the ansiweather GitHub page, if you’re interested.

-u lets me set which units to use, and I opted for imperial because I live in the USA and that’s how they do things here.

-l lets me set the location, and Hillsboro,OR is where I live.

Using this one is a little tricky, because you have to specify your location. Get a weather forecast from the Terminal? Why not! Again, it’s easy to install. You’ll get the same results as the web version, just with a lot less visual clutter. You can run the test by typing speedtest-cli or speedtest_cli in the Terminal. We’ve shown you how to test your internet connection speed using your browser, but wouldn’t it be faster just to open the Terminal and type a command? Yes, and installing this capability is simple: Test Your Internet Speed With speedtest_cli We’re really just scratching the surface here, but if you type wget -help you’ll learn a lot more.