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Why Use the Keyboard?
UNIX keyboarding is fast
Why on Earth would any red-blooded Macintosh owner want to leave the
comfort of the mouse to use a keyboard? After all, the graphical user inter-
face is what made the Macintosh great in the first place. With the Finder,
you can navigate and manage the various files on your hard drive with a few
clicks. This sounds simple enough, but for some tasks, using the keyboard
can be just as fast, if not faster.
Suppose, for example, that you need to copy a file from somewhere on your
hard drive to somewhere else on that same drive. To do so with the Finder,
you must first open a Finder window (by clicking the Finder icon in the Dock
or by double-clicking a drive icon on your Desktop). Then, by using a suc-
cession of mouse clicks, you navigate to where the file that you wish to copy
resides. Next, you might open another Finder window and navigate to the
folder where you wish to copy the file. (Note that opening the second Finder
window requires pressing Ô+N; clicking the Finder icon in the Dock doesn’t
open a second Finder window.) Finally, you duplicate the original file and
drag that copy to its intended destination.
Comparatively, by using the keyboard and the power of UNIX, you can
accomplish the same task with a one-line command. For some tasks, the
mouse is definitely the way to go, but you can perform some other tasks just
as quickly, if not faster, with the keyboard. For the skinny on one-line com-
mands, skip down to the upcoming section “Uncovering the Terminal.”
The UNIX keyboard is a powerful beast
So maybe you’re not an expert typist, and using the mouse still sounds invit-
ing. For many scenarios, you’d be correct in assuming that a mouse can
handle the job just as quickly and easily as a bunch of commands that you
have to memorize. Using the keyboard, however, offers some other distinct
advantages over the mouse. To allow you to control your computer from the
keyboard, all UNIX operating systems offer the command-line tool. With this
tool, you can enter commands one line at a time: hence, its name. Mac OS X
ships with the command-line application, Terminal. You can find it here:
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal
One shining feature of the command line is its efficiency. To wit: When you
use a mouse, one mouse click is equal to one command. When you use the
command line, on the other hand, you aren’t limited to entering one com-
mand at a time; rather, you can combine commands into a kind of super-
command (minus the silly cape, but with bulging muscles intact), with each
command performing some action of the combined whole. By using the com-
mand line, you can string together a whole bunch of commands to do a very
complex task.
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