A bit more about the File System

In the future, it’s likely that you will have some utility type apps or helpers that you need around. Confine them to a space and keep them available to you but out of the way. This may be things like a terminal window, an email client, or some webpage you are trying to keep open for communication.

We recommend unchecking the first option and leaving the rest alone. It is confusing when the spaces automatically move based on recent use.

Each application is unique, but they also share some similar bits. They share a similar menu system. They usually have Files which can usually be Edited. You have to View them. You’ll need to view them in the Window that the OS provides. And you’ll probably need Help sometimes (Go? Who knows… Apple).

Sometimes there’s a Format menu or who knows what. But there’s a pattern. The Application bar has some common logic to it. You can count on it.

Here are the official names of each section of what seems to be called “the menu bar” now. The seem to be documented a little differently depending on where you look.

Here are the most official Apple human interface guidelines for “The menu bar.” Check them out! There’s probably a whole team dedicated to designing, testing, researching, and documenting it.

There are Tabs like you may be used to in the browser, but in the finder, they seem pretty useless. What do you think? Try moving some things from one tab to another.

You can see it in many ways. At the core, it’s just some organization. There are plenty of file types and places to keep them.

Your home folder is your Username.

Macintosh Hard Drive / Users / YourUserName

This would be your Root folder.

Having a short computer name and username can make things a bit easier to read.

If you think about it, this is a lot like a set of instructions

• Go to the garage
• Look up on the top shelf
• Now, go to the box labeled “sports stuff”
• Look for the basketball
• Pick it up

(and way cooler looking)

The term “terminal” harks back to when computers were so big they’d fill up cabinets or even whole rooms. A terminal was basically a monitor (text-only) and a keyboard setup that let you operate the computer from afar through a direct, wired link. You could hook up several terminals to one computer, so multiple people could use it simultaneously.

Before Graphical user interfaces (even on our personal computers at home), we had things like Microsoft Disk Operating System.

This terminal is a similar experience.

(note that MS uses a back-slash  \  and Mac uses a forward-slash  / )

Unlike the old physical terminals that were separate pieces of hardware for interacting with computers, the macOS Terminal is a software application that emulates a command-line interface within the operating system. This virtual terminal allows you to interact with the underlying system through a shell, just as physical terminals did with older computers, but without the need for separate hardware.

Here’s a start with how to move around the file system with the terminal (aka the command line).

Print Working Directory: pwd

Change Directory: cd (needs a file-path too, so cd file-path-goes-here)

List Files: ls

Make Directory: mkdir (needs a directory name, so mkdir my-directory-name)

touch (needs a file-name.extension): creates a file touch hello.txt

nano (needs the file name) (details)

What else???

cd ~/ (gets you back to the root folder, but just using cd does that too)

cd ~/a/b/c

Unix systems (like Linux and macOS) use command names that are often short to make them quick to type and easy to remember, which is a big plus for something you use a lot. ls probably comes from “list,” and it does exactly that—it lists your directory contents in a snap. Keeping command names short and mnemonic is pretty standard in Unix tool design. Naming things is hard. ls seems weird to us. What would you have chosen?

This is a newer security feature for Mac. Now it asks you to explicitly give each program permission to use your files. Because if they didn’t then Mark would try and look at your photos.

You might not see the window pop up or you might close it by accident. So, if your terminal isn’t able to access your files then this is why! This is a good thing to think about for any application that isn’t working.