Hey! This is a quick little "crash course" on how to use your terminal on your computer.
First of all, what is the Terminal?
It's not a hardcore hacker setup like you see in the movies (although you can make it look like one). The terminal is where you talk to your computer using text instead of clicking. It's like having a conversation with your operating system.
Now, to open the terminal, it might look different depending on your computer. On a Mac, you want to open an application called Terminal. On Windows, you have a few options, either Command Prompt, PowerShell, or Windows Terminal. All of these apps come built in with your computer! You can install other ones, but we'll stick with the basics for now.
So go ahead and open your terminal now. You should see a prompt, which often shows your username, or computer name, or location.
Now, when I say "location", I mean literally where your terminal is currently working in your computer, in the file system. Kind of like when you are bouncing around in your Mac's Finder app or your Windows File Explorer.
I'll show you what I mean. Type "pwd" in the terminal, and hit enter right now (nothing will break). PWD stands for "print working directory". That's the exact folder you're in.
If you want to move around your file system (like the equivalent of double clicking on a folder), you have to know where to go. On Mac, type ls, and on Windows, type dir. These commands list all of the files and folders in your current location! If you want to remember that, remember on Mac "ls" sounds like "list", and on Windows, "dir" is the first part of the word "directory".
Now, chances are if you're doing this for the first time on Mac or PC, you'll see the Documents folder listed there after typing ls or dir.
To actually go to your Documents folder, type cd Documents (with a capital d). Go ahead and try that now. "cd" stands for "change directory", and it helps you... change directories! It teleports you wherever you want to go. If you want to go back to your home directory, type cd space dot dot. Try it. Now you're back, and you can type cd Documents again to go back to your Documents folder. You can do this infinite times, it's truly just moving around wherever you want to be and won't break anything. Sometimes I will cd into a folder, run ls or dir to see if it's the correct one, and if it's not, I do cd .. and try again. It's truly just like double clicking and moving around in Finder and the File Explorer.
Anyway, now that you're in Documents, let's make a folder there. Type mkdir space your name, so I wrote mkdir space Cassidy. mkdir stands for Make Directory! Folders and directories are the same thing when you're speaking with the terminal, which is why you're hearing that word a lot. Now, if you were to go to your Finder or File Explorer and clicked into your Documents folder, you'll find a folder there with your name on it. So cool, right?
Now, let's actually put a file in there. On Mac, type touch space fun.txt. On Windows it's a bit more, type echo. space > fun.txt. On both machines, this created a new empty text file called fun.txt! You can see it in the Finder or File Explorer if you still have that open.
To open the file from the terminal, on a Mac you type open space fun.txt and on Windows you type start space fun.txt. Go ahead and do that and you'll see that file open in your default text editing app (probably TextEdit or Notepad)! Make whatever changes you want, save it, and close it so you can go back to the terminal.
If you want to rename this file, you do mv space fun.txt space cool.txt. I'm just using fun and cool as the names here, you can do whatever you'd like. Think of mv as the word "move", because it's like you're "moving" that file to a different name. Cool, right?
Let's make a copy of cool.txt. The command for that is cp! Type cp space cool.txt space copy.txt. After hitting Enter, type ls on Mac or dir on Windows, and notice how you have both cool.txt and copy.txt listed! They are copies of each other. If you opened copy.txt with the open or start commands on Mac and Windows, respectively, you'll see that the contents of cool.txt are also in copy.txt.
Now, I want you to try something else neat. Try doing mkdir experiment right now to make a new experiment folder, and then do mv space cool.txt space experiment/, and then type ls or dir. Where did cool.txt go?? Open up your Finder or File Explorer, and click into the experiment folder. cool.txt is now in there! That mv command not only renames files, but also moves them into folders.
Okay, back to the terminal, and let's make a copy of that copy.txt. Remember, it's cp for copy, so type cp space copy.txt space fun.txt. We got our fun back! Hit ls or dir if you want to see them both in the folder next to the experiments folder.
Let's delete copy.txt. To do that, type rm space copy.txt. rm stands for Remove. Hit enter, and then if you do ls or dir, you can see that copy.txt is now gone. This is valuable, but to be clear: there is no trash can or recycle bin in the terminal. When it's gone, it's gone. So... be careful.
Anyway, these are the basic commands to get you started moving around and navigating in your terminal. But why learn this?
Commands like cd and mkdir are built into your system, but the terminal is also a launchpad for thousands of developer tools. If you work with developers or are an aspiring developer, it's handy to know the basics! There are programs that run via the terminal, instead of having a graphical interface. When you see the term "CLI", that means "command line interface", whereas your normal nice software is often called by developers a GUI, or graphical user interface!
If you look at the state of the world right now... a LOT happens in the terminal. You've probably heard of Claude Code or the GitHub Copilot CLI, for example. If you want to use these tools, you need to use the Terminal! I'll let you go to the documentation sites of your choice and install things (don't worry, there's good instructions everywhere).
The commands I taught you scratch the surface. Once you get comfortable, you can automate tasks really quickly with the terminal (I for example have renamed over 100 files in one command with the mv command, before), and use a lot more applications than you thought possible.
Remember: Everyone who's good at the terminal started exactly where you are. The difference is they kept typing, kept breaking things, and kept learning. You've got this.