How to Open Terminal on Mac and PowerShell on Windows (Plus 3 Commands)

"If I press the wrong thing on this black screen, am I going to break my computer?" That's usually the first thought when you open a terminal for the first time. The last lesson ended with a promise: this lesson would show you how to actually open one. Here's the short answer. On a Mac, press Command+Space to open Spotlight and type Terminal. On Windows, press the Win key+X and pick Windows PowerShell (or Terminal) from the menu that pops up. Once it's open, you only need three commands to start: pwd, ls, and cd. Check where you are (pwd), see what's there (ls), and move (cd). None of the three deletes or changes anything. Menu names and locations shift with OS updates, so focus less on today's exact labels and more on figuring out where you need to click right now.

Why the terminal feels scary

You've probably seen the movie scene: a hacker hammering out green text on a black screen. That image is why so many people feel a jolt of fear the first time they open a terminal. Reality is different. A terminal is closer to ordering at a counter by telling the person exactly what you want, instead of tapping a screen at a kiosk. It's just a different input method, sentences (commands) instead of taps (mouse clicks). Nothing more.

The three commands in this lesson are about as gentle as it gets. They don't delete or change anything, they just answer "where am I" and "what's here."

Opening a terminal on Mac

1. Press Command + Space to open Spotlight search.
2. Type Terminal.
3. Confirm Terminal shows up in the results and press Enter.

You can also open it from Finder instead of Spotlight. Open the Utilities folder inside Applications, and double-click Terminal. This Finder route is also documented in Apple's own support pages.

I'd lean toward Spotlight for your first time. It's a lot faster than digging through Finder to the Utilities folder every time.

Once the window opens, you'll just see a blinking cursor. Don't let that throw you, that's where you type.

What scared me the first time I sat in front of this screen wasn't the commands. It was watching folders appear and disappear on their own. The screen kept scrolling by without me typing anything, and I couldn't tell what was being created or deleted in between.

Opening a terminal on Windows

1. Press Win key + X.
2. From the menu that appears, choose Windows PowerShell (on Windows 11 this may show up as Terminal instead). You might see a second entry right next to or below it with the same name and an (Admin) label. For today, pick the one without (Admin). Clicking the (Admin) entry brings up a User Account Control (UAC) prompt, and on a work-issued PC you may not have the admin password to get past it.
3. Once the window opens, check that the first line starts with PS C:\Users\yourname>.

PowerShell already comes installed on every Windows machine, there's nothing to download. That said, Windows has two command-line programs that look similar: PowerShell and Command Prompt (cmd). If the first line has a PS in front, you're in PowerShell. If it just reads C:\Users\yourname> with no PS, that's Command Prompt. This lesson assumes PowerShell. If Command Prompt opened instead, close it and pick again from the Win+X menu.

Starting with Windows 11 version 22H2 (released October 2022 and later), Windows Terminal is set as the default command-line app. If your Win+X menu shows a separate "Terminal" entry, that's it, and it's a step up from the old blue PowerShell console window: tabs, sharper text, the works. I'd recommend picking that one if it's available. Either way, the commands in this lesson behave identically.

Three minimum commands: pwd, ls, cd (work the same on Mac and Windows)

Now just try the three commands below. Per Microsoft's own documentation, all three type exactly the same way in Windows PowerShell and still work. That's because pwd, ls, and cd are registered inside PowerShell as aliases for the real commands, Get-Location, Get-ChildItem, and Set-Location, respectively. On Mac, pwd, ls, and cd are the actual native commands.

pwd, check where you are (print working directory)

Mac:

pwd

/Users/haneul

Windows (PowerShell):

pwd

Path
----
C:\Users\haneul

ls, see what's here (list)

Mac:

ls

Desktop    Documents    Downloads    Pictures

Windows (PowerShell):

ls

    Directory: C:\Users\haneul

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
d-----         2026-08-01     9:14                Desktop
d-----         2026-08-01     9:14                Documents
d-----         2026-08-01     9:14                Downloads

cd, move (change directory)

Mac:

cd Documents
pwd

/Users/haneul/Documents

Windows (PowerShell):

cd Documents
pwd

Path
----
C:\Users\haneul\Documents

Put into plain words, here's what each one is doing. pwd is asking "where am I right now?" ls is asking "what's in here?" cd is saying "let's go over there." Type them in order, like you're having a conversation.

Why it's fine to make mistakes (and why some commands aren't)

The three commands you learned today, pwd, ls, and cd, are all read-only. They show your location, show a list, and move you around, nothing else. None of them creates, deletes, or overwrites a file. Mistype something, wander into the wrong folder, it doesn't matter, you can always back out.

That said, I don't want to oversell how safe this is. The terminal absolutely does have commands that delete files for real: rm on Mac and Linux, Remove-Item (or del) in Windows PowerShell. Those can be hard, or flat-out impossible, to undo. We're not touching them today. Just remember this one thing for whenever you do run into them later: don't type them as casually as you're typing today's three.

Common problems you'll run into

You get "command not found" (or something similar). On Mac (zsh) it looks like zsh: command not found: Is. In Windows PowerShell it's a completely different message: The term 'Is' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Different wording, same cause. It shows up when you typed something with genuinely different letters, like Is instead of ls. Typing something like Pwd with different capitalization, on the other hand, almost never causes an error. Windows PowerShell doesn't care about case in command names at all, and Mac's default file system (APFS) doesn't either by default, so Pwd, PWD, and pwd all run as the exact same command. If you hit an error, check for an actual spelling mistake before you worry about capitalization, then try again. After you install Claude Code in the next lesson, you might see a similar-looking error once more, that one means the system can't yet find where the installer put things, a different cause from what's happening today.

You get an error moving into a folder name with a space in it. Say a folder is named "My Documents" and you type cd My Documents. That'll error out. On Mac (zsh) you might see something unfamiliar like cd: string not in pwd: My. In Windows PowerShell you'll see a different unfamiliar message: Set-Location : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument 'Documents'. Different wording, same cause again. The space makes the shell read "My" and "Documents" as two separate words instead of one folder name. Wrap the whole thing in quotes, cd "My Documents", and it's solved.

You typed different capitalization and it worked anyway. Mac's default file system (APFS) and Windows' default file system (NTFS) are both case-insensitive. Type cd documents and it'll still move you into a folder actually named Documents. Worth knowing this is just the default behavior of these two systems, though. Once you move to a Linux server or certain development environments later, case sensitivity can be enforced strictly, and you won't get the same free pass you're getting today.

You opened Command Prompt instead of PowerShell and nothing works. Check whether the first line starts with PS, as covered above.

What took me the longest to work out wasn't typos. It was learning how to read the screen. English text kept pouring down, and I couldn't tell what was just a passing log and what was a line waiting for my answer. Tools today collapse that output for you, but back then everything just kept scrolling by, all at once.

One time I waited for over an hour. I assumed it was hard at work, but it turned out to be sitting there, waiting on my answer the whole time. The line asking for it had scrolled up out of view, so I never even saw it.

So what I did was keep asking questions back. Things like "What does that mean?" "So what should I do?" "Are you working on this right now?" If you don't know, you can just ask. You don't need to already know the terminal. Whoever you need to ask is right there inside it.

Your task today

There's just one thing to do today. Actually open a terminal (or PowerShell) and type pwd, ls, and cd yourself, in order. Seeing what shows up on screen with your own eyes is the goal.

Coming up next

Once you've opened a terminal and moved around with those three commands, you're ready. The next lesson installs Claude Code directly on top of this same terminal. If you're on a Mac, keep using the same Terminal app you opened today. If you're on Windows, keep using the same PowerShell you opened today. You don't need to set up a separate Linux environment like WSL ahead of time, that's covered later as an optional path if you ever need it.