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