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Usage
To open and close terminals
To open a new terminal window
Choose File → Open Terminal (or right-click the terminal window and choose Open Terminal).
The new terminal inherits the working directory from its parent terminal.
To close a terminal window
Choose File → Close Window. This action closes the terminal and terminates any subprocesses that you opened from the terminal. If you close the last terminal window, the Terminal application exits.
To add a new tabbed terminal to a window
Choose File → Open Tab (or right-click the terminal window and choose Open Tab). The new terminal inherits the working directory from the previously active terminal.
To modify a terminal window
To hide the menubar
Choose View → Show Menubar (or right-click the terminal window and choose Show Menubar).
To show a hidden menubar
Right-click the terminal window and choose Show Menubar from the popup menu.
To show or hide the toolbars
Choose View → Show Toolbars.
To customize the toolbars
Be sure to show the toolbars first; then choose Edit → Toolbars....
To show or hide the window decorations
Choose View → Show Window Borders.
To put a terminal window into fullscreen
Choose View → Fullscreen from the menubar (or right-click the terminal window and choose Fullscreen).
To change the appearance of the terminal window
See the section called Preferences for information about the options that you choose in the Terminal Preferences dialog to change the appearance and behaviour of the terminal windows. For example, you can change the background color or the location of the scrollbar.
To work with the contents of terminal windows
To scroll through previous commands and output
Perform one of the following actions
- Use the scrollbar, which is usually displayed on the right side of each terminal window.
- Press the Shift-Page Up, Shift-Page Down, Shift-Up, Shift-Down, Shift-Home, or Shift+End} keys.
- Use the middle wheel button on your mouse if applicable.
Terminal mimics the FreeBSD console when Scroll Lock is pressed. When scroll lock is active, ordinary input and output from the shell is suspended and you can scroll through the history with Shift-Page Up and Shift-Page Down or using the optional scrollbar. Press Ctrl-S to activate the scroll lock and Ctrl-Q to disable it afterwards. The number of lines that you can scroll back in the terminal window is determined by the Scrollback setting in the General section of the Terminal Preferences dialog.
To select and copy text
You can select text in any of the following ways:
- To select a character at a time, click on the first character that you want to select and drag the mouse to the last character that you want to select.
- To select a word at a time, double-click on the first word that you want to select and drag the mouse to the last word that you want to select.
- To select a line at a time, triple-click on the first line that you want to select and drag the mouse to the last line that you want to select.
These actions select all text between the first and last items. For all text selections, Terminal copies the selected text into the clipboard when you release the mouse button. To explicitly copy the selected text, choose Edit → Copy.
To paste text into a terminal
If you previously copied text to the clipboard, you can paste the text into a terminal by performing one of the following actions: