What is "the terminal"?
a text-based interface used to directly interact with your computer
You want to play around with Claude Code. The videos and tutorials all say "terminal this" "terminal that".
Immediately you're not sure what's going on or if you even belong there.
That's totally normal. The Terminal has always been one of the biggest barriers to entry for engineering. And while engineering is getting much easier, the terminal remains a weird black box with white text and a blinking cursor.
The goal of this post is to make the terminal a little less confusing and intimidating.
The terminal is not a trendy buzzword, it's a core piece of computing history. For decades, if you wanted to do anything on a computer, you needed to know how to type it into the terminal. As User Interfaces got better and better through the 80s and 90s, it allowed more and more users to accomplish their tasks without ever opening the terminal.
But behind the scenes, the entire internet is essentially run on tools engineers use through a Command-Line Interface, or CLI. These are accessed through the terminal.
This is a functional overview of the MacOS terminal. You'll learn about what happens as you follow Anthropic's official Claude Code Quickstart.
Terminal 101
I open my terminal through spotlight search.
⌘+space then type terminal
Anatomy of the terminal
| Part | Example | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Username | codyfeda | Your macOS account name |
@ | @ | Separator |
| Computer name | CodyBook-Pro | Your machine's network name |
| Current folder | buzzword-compliance | The folder you're currently inside |
% | % | Shell is ready for input |
I don't get it
Think of it like texting your computer. Instead of clicking menus, you're telling it exactly what to do.
You can think of using the terminal as though you're texting your computer.
Here are 3 standard commands you'll see
mkdir and ls
mkdir = make directory. This creates a new folder with the name you specify. Similar to right-click -> New Folder through finder
ls -l = long list of all files in directory. This is similar to just having a finder window open
mv
mv [original folder name] [new folder name] = move directory from one path to another, or rename
cd
cd [directory] = change directory nagivate through file structure
curl
curl [target url]
This
Claude Code Installation
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
There are two things happening here, connected by | which is called a pipe. A pipe feeds the output of whatever's on the left into whatever's on the right.
On the left: curl is the tool to make web requests, so this will download install.sh. The -fsSL flags control how it behaves:
-ffail silently-ssilent mode (no progress bar)-Sstill shows errors-Lfollow redirects
All of these together hide a bunch of outputs from this command, which makes it even more black-boxy.
On the right: bash is a command line interpreter. .sh is a script file that is run in bash. This script file downloads and installs Claude Code. So this line downloads the script file, then runs it.
Step 2
claude
Now that you have Claude installed, you can run it in the command line using claude.
claude is a command that opens a whole new process within the terminal. You can think of this being the same as double-clicking an icon to open an application. But instead of opening a new window, it switches the terminal to something different.
You can see the difference because it no longer shows your username and current folder at the beginning of each line. You're now inside Claude Code's own environment.