16 6 terminal tips and tricks

16.6 Terminal Tips and Tricks After you've used Terminal awhile, you may feel ready for a few of these power tips 16.6.1 Switching Windows You can switch among your various Terminal windows by pressing -1, -2, and so on (up to -9) You'll be able to identify the windows easily if you choose to include the Command key in the title bars (Use the Window section of the Settings Preference pane.) 16.6.2 Non-Contiguous Selection You can select blobs of text, just as in Microsoft Word or TextEdit To select a single rectangle of text anywhere in the window, Option-drag through it To select multiple rectangles, -drag You can then copy and paste just those selected blobs 16.6.3 Double-Clickable Unix Tools Most people are used to thinking of Unix applications as programs you run from within Terminal Many, though, appear in the Finder as regular old icons—and you can open them by double-clicking, just as you would a traditional Mac OS X program This trick isn't very useful for commands that require flags But for some, like cal, clicking provides a quick way to run the program, especially if you keep it in your Dock To double-click a Unix program, though, you first have to find it—and that may not be easy Mac OS X's Unix directory structure is labyrinthine indeed But why not ask Terminal where the program is? You can exactly that using the which command: which cal, for example Terminal responds with /usr/bin/cal, telling you that cal resides in the /usr/bin directory To get there, use the open command in Terminal, like this: open /usr/bin A window opens in the Finder; inside, you'll find the cal icon Drag the icon to the right side of the Dock From now on, when you click that Dock icon, a new Terminal window opens, automatically displaying this month's calendar You've shaved several precious seconds off the time it would have taken you to open iCal