Terminal — Mac

Support › Getting Started

How to open, navigate, and reload the built-in Terminal on a Mac so you can run install commands.

Your Mac already has a terminal built in. Here’s how to use it.

Open Terminal

Press Cmd+Space to open Spotlight, type Terminal, press Enter.

You’ll see a window with a command prompt. This is where you’ll run install commands.

Navigate to a folder

Drag a folder from Finder onto the Terminal window. It pastes the path. Hit Enter.

That’s it — you’re now in that folder.

# The drag-and-drop pastes something like this:
cd /Users/jane/OneDrive/my-project

Get back to Finder

open .

This opens the current folder in Finder.

Reload your terminal

After installing tools, you sometimes need to reload so the terminal picks up new commands:

exec zsh

Mac uses zsh

Wherever this site says exec bash, Mac users should use exec zsh instead. Modern Macs use zsh as the default shell.

Terminal says ‘command not found’ after installing something?

Run exec zsh to reload. If that doesn’t work, close the Terminal window (Cmd+W) and open a new one (Cmd+N).

‘Permission denied’ errors?

Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and add Terminal.app. You should not need sudo for any install in this guide.