“Apple’s Terminal application is supremely powerful on your Mac, and while you should be wary when using it you can benefit from some super-useful Mac tricks if you do,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“The Terminal application can be understood as a text-based user interface with which to control your Mac using command line tools,” Evans writes. “These are very powerful, and enable you to change lots of the ways your Mac usually behaves.”
“Terminal is unforgiving,” Evans writes. “You don’t need to fear it, but you should be very, very careful to use precisely the right code when entering instructions for your Mac – particularly if using any command including the word ‘sudo.'”
I’m going to share five neat Terminal tips:
• How to change default screenshot image format
• How to create a Recent Applications folder
• How to flush Mac memory
• How to fix your Mac (sometimes)
• How to stay up forever
The Terminal commands are in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We use ’em all, and one of the first things we do with new Macs is to ditch the default .PNG for screenshots.
The Mac was developed as a GUI computer.
OS X used to have pretty fine grained control through the UI, but Apple has steadily dumbed down the UI.
Ok, I’ll bite, MDN groupies. What’s wrong with PNG screenshots?
I suppose MDN could have their own uses for screenshots that PNG images don’t fulfill. Example: Returning the setting to PDF format for documentation purposes.
Me: I use PNG as my standard image format for everything. It’s superior to JPEG in every way. A favorite use is creating images with invisible backgrounds, similar to GIF images. They’re great for creating file and folder icons. No more squares with stuff in them.