Easy Mac Hacks: What's New in Terminal in Yosemite

Every Monday we show you how to do something quick and cool using built-in OS X utilities such as Terminal, Apple’s command line application. These easy hacks can make life better and simpler, and don’t require any knowledge of coding — all you need is a keyboard to type 'em out!

We've covered a lot of Terminal tips and tricks on this site over the years, and the basis behind all of those tips was the use of the Terminal in OS X. In Yosemite, the Terminal sports a slightly different user interface, and a new icon, but that's not all that's new with one of our favorite power-user tools on the Mac. There's a few other changes under the hood that will leave power users everywhere wondering how they lived without thm. Let's delve in and see what's new.

Scroll through manual pages

The "man" command in Terminal makes it easy to look up the documentation for commands on your Mac. When looking at the manual pages, it's usually a pain to scroll through the document (if you needed to look at something near the bottom, for instance), because you'd need to press the space bar to go page-by-page through the docs.

In Yosemite, however, you can easily scroll through the manual pages just by using the scrolling feature of your mouse or trackpad, just as if you were scrolling through a web page.

Give it a try:

1. Open Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities).
2. Type in "man man" to open the manual page for the manual command.
3. Using the scroll feature of your mouse or trackpad to begin scrolling in the window.

You'll notice that when you reach the top or bottom of the document, you'll hear an audible beep to let you know you're at the top or end of the document. (Remember, you can quit the manual by pressing q.)

Inline search for items in Terminal

Searching through on-screen items in Terminal has always been a bit of a pain, but Apple has aimed to make it easier with the latest version of the Terminal application in OS X Yosemite.

Now with the new version of the Terminal app, search can be your friend:

1. In any Terminal window, press Command + F.
2. In the Find search field, type in your query.
3. Press the Return key.

After pressing the Return key, any matched words will be highlighted in Yellow just like in Safari, Pages, or other applications where inline search can be found. When you're done with search, simply click the "Done" button.