Put terminal magic into your toolbox and use your computer like a pro!

The terminal used to be something everyone knew about. If you talked to a developer in the 90s or early 2000s, they all lived in a text-based environment. These days most people go straight to graphical tools, and the terminal feels like some ancient thing nerds use at 2 AM.

But for blind users, this old “outdated” tool is actually one of the best and most accessible environments we have.

Using the terminal is a way to interact with the computer where the user writes commands and the computer responds accordingly but do not be scared the basic things are very easy: Just a couple of words with the correct symbols in the correct order. The great thing about it is that the terminal is pure text. No unlabeled buttons, no weird layouts, no visual-only menus. Everything you need is written out, line by line, You don’t fight with animations or complicated interfaces. You just type commands and get results.

For me, as a blind person who works with math coding and data, the terminal is the one place where I always feel fully in control. I don’t have to hope that an app UI is accessible. I don’t have to hunt for buttons. I don’t need someone to explain what’s on the screen. I just use commands, and everything is consistent.

It’s funny: sighted people used to rely on the terminal because computers weren’t advanced enough. Now some of us rely on it because computers have become too “fancy” in ways that often break accessibility.

I honestly think more blind people should learn the basics. Even simple things like navigating folders, running scripts, installing tools, or checking logs can make life way easier. You don’t need to be a programmer , just knowing a bit of the command line gives you a powerful and predictable workspace.

On macOS for example, with one line in the terminal, something like: brew install programname you can install software instantly. No inaccessible website, no hunting for the right download button, no guessing which file works for your system. Just type it, hit enter, done.

Another example would be if you want to filter all your .docx files from a directory and move them to another directory that you then want to compress into a .zip file and send it via email. I just write a terminal command that takes 2 seconds. The thing is it takes 2 seconds regardless if there are 2 or 200 files in the directory. How much time do you need to do this from the graphical user interface (GUI)? and

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting you do everything by it but some use cases can save you much time and energy! Make sure to subscribe to not miss my next terminal post where I will talk about my most time saving terminal tricks.