Is there a guide for using the Mac’s Terminal with VoiceOver?

By Igna Triay, 9 March, 2016

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi all, so I have had my mac for quite a while, and I would like to learn how to use terminal. Could someone post a guide or tell me the basics on how to use terminal with voiceover? Thanks for any help.
Igna

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Comments

By KE7ZUM on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

Not much to know. You interact with the edit field to read what's up and use vo up and down to read the lines. You type in the edit field and vo will read the last line of text normally to you , if not just interact and explore.

By Igna Triay on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

Thanks. How do I enter commands? What I normally do, I just typed in the edit field commands, then I press enter, though nothing seems to happen.

By Nathan Stocking on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

I'm not sure I understand your question. If you simply mean as an accessibility question, just type the command and press enter to send it. If you want guidance on what commands to use, this is beyond the scope of this resource, as there are so many possibilities from terminal. If you haven't used terminal before and have no specific reason to use it now, you may want to be careful as the terminal makes it easy to destroy things.

By david s on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

Hello,

What is it that you are trying to do? With terminal, you enter a command and nothing may show up on the screen but things could be happening in the background.

Terminal is a great tool but for the unfamiliar, it can ruin your system. I know of many folks including myself, that had to reinstall the OS due to a bad entry or command. In some cases, a command may alter the hardware layer of your mac and reinstalling the OS may not work.

I am not trying to scare you but just be aware of what the terminal can do.

With that being said, if you want to see some commands you can use with terminal, check out this link. http://ss64.com/osx/

HTH and good luck.

By KE7ZUM on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

Yeah, I accidently deleted 1.5 terabytes of data off of a drive due to a badly entered rsync command. It sucked! And now I check and recheck. If you have no need to use the terminal, or are a beginner to osx and computers in general, use the GUI. Only when you are very comfortable with the inner workings of software and or hardware may you learn the basics of the unix world.

By Igna Triay on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

Thanks. Better wait till I am more advanced.

By KE7ZUM on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

You could. I'm adventurous but yeah I was very very careful. If you know unix you can use the terminal, but yeah I would wait maybe a year. I waited about 2-3 months as I used the windows command prompt all the time for about 10 years so I had to relearn some stuff, but that was about it. Don't give up, just wait a while.

By Igna Triay on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 10:30

Yeah I am also quite adventurous. When I had my braille note, which I still do, but barely use it, I ran into some problems with the email. Long story short, let's just say that I called the humanware technicians, and they weren't able to fix the problem. The funny thing was, that I decided to do some experimenting, and it worked. Lol. But yes, I'll wait a while on using terminal.