How to Quickly Navigate to a Folder in Terminal on Mac.
On Windows 10, you can open cmd in any folder by typing cmd in the location bar in File Explorer, or simply holding down the Shift key and right-clicking the File Explorer window. In the context menu, you will see the option Open command window here. However, there is no such option to quickly open Terminal on Mac. When you open Terminal on Mac, it always opens in your home directory, but there are times when you might need to open them in a specific folder on your system. It turns out that you can also open a terminal in any directory on macOS. There are 3 ways to do this.
- Use the cd command.
- Use the built-in Mac shortcut.
- Use a third party application.
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Quickly go to a folder in Terminal on Mac
First method
This is the most common way.
Just open a terminal, enter the cd command and specify the path to the folder you want to navigate. For instance,
cd ~ / Documents
Alternatively, if you are too lazy to enter the full path name, you can also drag the folder (or path name) onto the Terminal application icon. The folder path will be automatically selected and then press Enter.
The second method
While the previous method works, it’s not the most efficient way to navigate to a folder in Terminal on Mac.
As with Windows, Mac also allows you to open Terminal directly from a specific folder. However, this option is hidden deep in Mac preferences. Let’s see how to solve this.
To get started, go to System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts Services.
Find “New terminal in folder” in the settings and check the box.
The good thing is that these services work in all applications, not just the Finder. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to it. But I do not recommend doing this, as the keyboard shortcut can conflict with other built-in keyboard shortcuts.
Now that you are in Finder, just right click on the folder, go to the Services section and you will see a new option – New Terminal in Folder. When you click on which, the Terminal will open in the current folder
The third method
Alternatively, you can use many third party apps available to navigate to the folder in the terminal. I recommend cdto and OpenInTerminal.
In this article, we will be using the OpenInTerminal application. It’s free and open source.
Download OpenInTerminal first. At the time of writing, the latest version is OpenInTerminal-Lite 0.4.1.
After downloading, go to the application, unzip it and move it to the Applications folder.
Now you need to add OpenInTerminal-Lite to your crawler toolbar. To do this, hold down the Cmd key and drag the application to the Finder toolbar.
The application will then show you a small icon in the search box, clicking on which will open Terminal in the current folder.
That’s all.
Now, to uninstall OpenInTerminal, you must first uninstall it from the Finder toolbar before deleting it from the Applications folder. To do this, open Finder and choose View Customize Toolbar. A new window will open, click and hold the OpenInTerminal icon and then drag it outside the toolbar to remove it from the toolbar. Now you can go ahead and delete the original application from the Application folder.
In general, there were several ways to navigate to a folder in the terminal on Mac, although not a splash screen, but a time saver if you use the terminal frequently. In general, I would recommend using the New Terminal in Folder option as it is built into the Mac, or if you prefer the folder option, use the OpenInTerminal app. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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