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Apple's Terminal App Gets Colorful Redesign in macOS Tahoe
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If the primary use-case is remote ssh access, Termius is a great terminal emulator. I've used many over the years, been pretty happy with Termius.
Being really, really pedantic - Unix is (now) a set of standards for APIs, libraries, user utilities and command line tools, file organisation etc. along with a commercial certification and trademark licensing scheme, that can be implemented by a whole range of otherwise quite different OSs, whereas Linux technically refers to a specific OS kernel that is commonly combined with the GNU tools and a bunch of other GPL-licensed projects to make a range of Unix-like OS "distributions" (including Android).
...and AFAIK the only reason that GNU/Linux is not Unix is that the Open Systems Unix certification/licensing procedure (a) costs money and (b) a distro that contained claims to be "Unix" couldn't be re-distributed as required by the GPL. In reality, "Linux" feels more like using a traditional Unix system than MacOS.
There are many terminal apps, and many of them run on both Linux and macOS.
Mac comes with just one terminal app, but you can install others.
Most Linuxs comes with several, and you can install even more
There is considerable crossover
On top of this, there is a choice of which shell runs in the terminal and there are at least three that come installed on Mac and Linux. I notice my Mac has sh, csh, and zsh. As do mos Linux systems.
Further, there is no single "Linux", Linux has a whole family tree of distributions that come with differening apps installed and even diferent desktop systems. The Linux that runs your Android phone is different from the one inside the SpaceX Starlink satelite and is differnt from tyhe one inside your WiFi router and all of theose are different from what you'd run on a desktop system or in a robot.
I think there are actually a couple "UNIX certified" Linux distributions but the major ones are not.
Note that "UNIX based" might also refer to the "genealogy" of the system tracing back to the original UNIX. As example, MacOS -> Darwin -> FreeBSD -> UNIX makes MacOS "UNIX based", whereas Linux is not.
Oh no they didn’t!
Apple has adopted the, “SQUIRREL” methodology vs cutting bloat/bugs
Look shiny and we changed something, a thing that doesn’t need changing…
Apple has adopted the, “SQUIRREL” methodology vs cutting bloat/bugs
Look shiny and we changed something, a thing that doesn’t need changing…
Ugh. Just what we needed. NOT.
I'll never understand why so many people insist on running green-on-gray in terminal windows. It's ugly and hard to read. Black on white, people. WAY easier to see. Yes, I too have used green screen monitors. I don't any more, because better things exist now.
And fully opaque background. NO transparency.
I'll never understand why so many people insist on running green-on-gray in terminal windows. It's ugly and hard to read. Black on white, people. WAY easier to see. Yes, I too have used green screen monitors. I don't any more, because better things exist now.
And fully opaque background. NO transparency.
Close.
macOS sprung from NextStep (which is why so many calls had "NS" in the name), which was based (among other things) on BSD Unix. So, macOS is a direct descendant of Unix.
Linux is what happened when someone wanted Unix but didn't want to deal with ATT.
Back in the day, you could telnet directly to port 80 on a server and issue HTTP requests and view the responses by hand. It blew people's minds, they looked at you like you were Neo seeing the Matrix directly.
But now all web traffic has moved into HTTPS, so you can't just telnet any more. Browsers have integrated debugging consoles that let you look at the requests in full detail. Even most mail servers have moved from non-encrypted to encrypted ports. So, I haven't had the need to telnet in a decade.
I still have to temporarily enable unencrypted connections for testing sometimes.
Telnet is a critical tool for me. I've been installing it with brew for years now.
Oh, and you can still spoof a connection to most SMTP servers by telnetting to port 25. Not useful for relay, but you can typically send mail to local users with it. That's also incredibly useful for testing.
That’s great!
I’ll go for green on black like I have since 1983
I’ll go for green on black like I have since 1983
macOS is actually derived from BSD Unix so it probably is closer to current BSB derivatives than it is to Linux. That said, Linux was created as an open source replacement for Unix so they are quite similar.
I know you've gotten a couple suggestions already but I just wanna throw Prompt 3 out there too, works well for me.
"it's remained largely unchanged for over two decades"
Try almost four -- this started out as the Terminal app in NeXTStep. So 1987? And I'm sure that got adapted from something else out of Carnegie Mellon.
Try almost four -- this started out as the Terminal app in NeXTStep. So 1987? And I'm sure that got adapted from something else out of Carnegie Mellon.
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I use Termius for remote management. Both on macOS as on iPadOS.
And iTerm for local stuff.
Rather than telnet or disabling encryption, you can use openssl to act the same way, but over https...
Code:
> openssl s_client -connect macrumors.com:443 2025-06-17 13:22:21
Connecting to 2606:4700:10::ac43:1682
CONNECTED(00000005)
depth=2 C=US, O=Google Trust Services LLC, CN=GTS Root R4
verify return:1
depth=1 C=US, O=Google Trust Services, CN=WE1
verify return:1
depth=0 CN=macrumors.com
verify return:1
---
..... lots of info removed .....
---
New, TLSv1.3, Cipher is TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
Protocol: TLSv1.3
Server public key is 256 bit
This TLS version forbids renegotiation.
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
No ALPN negotiated
Early data was not sent
Verify return code: 0 (ok)
---
GET /
---
Post-Handshake New Session Ticket arrived:
SSL-Session:
.... lots of info removed ....
---
read R BLOCK
<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>cloudflare</center>
</body>
</html>
closedImagine if they used their new containerization toolkit and enabled VMs to run on iPads with this....Skip the terminal and Darwin part and just go straight to Linux which is what most people are wanting to do anyway as far as development/running CLIs... And so you'd get an experience kind of in between WSL on Windows and Devcontainers in vscode and similar IDEs
What is it about Kitty that would be difficult to challenge? I'm not trying to argue. I genuinely don't know and am curious. I've tried Kitty before, but found the configuration annoying, so I typically use either use iTerm2 or Warp. What are Kitty's killer features?
Will this updated Terminal app still echo your input into all open panes, or can you finally have multiple panes, each with its own session? I never understood the point of the Terminal app echoing your commands into every pane you have open.
Warp supports echoing commands in all open panes, which is nice in a small handful of scenarios, but this isn't the default behavior and it is easy to toggle between commands being isolated in the pane that has focus and being echoed into every pane. As far as I know, Apple's Terminal app has only ever echoed commands into every pane with no option to turn that largely useless behavior off.
Warp supports echoing commands in all open panes, which is nice in a small handful of scenarios, but this isn't the default behavior and it is easy to toggle between commands being isolated in the pane that has focus and being echoed into every pane. As far as I know, Apple's Terminal app has only ever echoed commands into every pane with no option to turn that largely useless behavior off.
Basically I oversimplified it
You have 2 major systems, Unix-like (linux and macOS, ofcourse their are also a lot of differences) and Windows (where basically nothing is Unix except for WSL)
While they're at it, hopefully they'll fix the annoying bug where the app automatically switches back to the first tab whenever the window is restored from minimized.