Terminal includes several features that specifically access macOS APIs and features. These settings do not alter the operation of Terminal, and the xterm settings do not match the behavior of xterm. Available options are ansi, dtterm, nsterm, rxvt, vt52, vt100, vt102, xterm, xterm-16color and xterm-256color, which differ from the OS X 10.5 (Leopard) choices by dropping the xterm-color and adding xterm-16color and xterm-256color.
The preferences dialog for Terminal.app in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and later offers choices for values of the TERM environment variable. The user can choose other shells available with macOS, such as the KornShell, tcsh, and bash. Īs a terminal emulator, the application provides text-based access to the operating system, in contrast to the mostly graphical nature of the user experience of macOS, by providing a command-line interface to the operating system when used in conjunction with a Unix shell, such as zsh (the default shell in macOS Catalina ). Terminal originated in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, the predecessor operating systems of macOS. Terminal ( Terminal.app) is the terminal emulator included in the macOS operating system by Apple. Terminal 2.2 running the top program under macOS
