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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• If you want fast and efficient, the command line is the way to go.
• MacOS has plenty of handy CLI tools ready to be used.
• Each of these tools is free and easily installed.

I know what you’re thinking: “MacOS is all about user-friendliness and GUI apps.” Although that may be true, you’d be remiss if you didn’t at least know about some of the terminal apps that are available to the OS.

These terminal apps are lightweight, reliable, and much easier to use than you might think. Sure, you have to type (as opposed to point-and-click), but once you understand how these tools work, you might find them more efficient than their GUI counterparts.

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If you’re still questioning this idea, keep reading and see if any of these tools might tempt you to open the MacOS terminal app. 

1. pandoc

Have you ever needed to convert a file from one type to another, but didn’t want to have to open the GUI, open the file, convert the file, and then close the app? If that sounds like you, then you’ll be happy to know that there’s a command-line tool called pandoc, that makes this process easier.

Pandoc is available as a pkg installation package that you can download from the official GitHub site. Double-click it and follow the simple instructions. Or, if you have Homebrew installed, you can add Pandoc with the command:

brew install pandoc

Once installed, pandoc is simple to use. Open the terminal app, change into the directory housing the file to be converted (such as cd Documents), and run the command:

Let’s say you want to convert a .txt file to a .docx file. The command for this would be:

pandoc -s file.txt -o file.docx

You can see a complete list of conversion commands on the official pandoc examples page.

2. taskwarrior

Taskwarrior is a command-line to-do list app that allows you to manage a list of tasks in a fast and efficient way. You can add tasks, view tasks, and mark tasks as done. Although it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a GUI app, taskwarrior doesn’t get in your way, nor does it complicate things.

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To install taskwarrior, you have to have Homebrew installed and then add the app with:

brew install taskwarrior-tui

Here’s how it works. Say you want to add a task to do the dishes. The command for this would be:

task add Do dishes

Once you’ve done that, you can list your tasks with:

task list

Each task is assigned an ID (first column). Using that ID, you can append to a task like this:

task appended ID and client toilets

Where ID is the ID of the task to be deleted.

If you list the tasks, you should see the task with the appended information added.

When a task is complete, you can remove it with:

task done ID

Where ID is the ID of the task to be deleted.

To find out all you can do with the task (there’s quite a bit), make sure to read the manual with the command:

man task

3. Ollama

I’ve written extensively about Ollama, and knew it would be one of the command-line utilities in this list. Ollama is a local AI that you can install, pull any of the supported models for use, and then run your queries from the terminal app. It’s powerful, and because it’s installed locally, it’s private and doesn’t place a burden on the power grid.

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When you install Ollama on MacOS, you can either install the GUI app and use the command line, or you can simply install the command-line tool only using Homebrew, like so:

homebrew install ollama

Once installed, pull a model with the command:

ollama pull MODEL

Where MODEL is the model you want. You can find a list of available models on the official Ollama site. Say you want to pull the gpt-oss:20b model, which can be done with:

ollama run gpt-oss:20b

You can then run the model with:

ollama run gpt-oss:20b

At the Ollama prompt, you can then run your queries as you normally would.

4. ag

The ag command allows you to search for strings within files. Even better, ag searches multiple files for the same string. Say you have a bunch of text files in your Documents directory and you need to know which of them contain ZDNET. The ag command will not only tell you which files contain the string, but it’ll do it very quickly.

The ag command is a part of the_silver_searcher package and can be installed with Homebrew like so:

brew install the_silver_searcher

Once installed, you could search those files by changing into the directory containing them (such as cd Documents) and then running the search like this:

ag ZDNET

The results will list which files contain the string.

5. yt-dlp

Do you ever need to download videos from YouTube? If so, you’ll be glad to know that there’s a command-line tool for that, called yt-dlp. This app is fast and regularly updated (so it’ll stay ahead of any changes YouTube makes that might prevent it from working).

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Yt-dlp can be installed (along with the required ffmpeg) with Homebrew, like so:

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

Once installed, you can download YouTube videos (subject to rights, of course) with the command:

yt-dlp URL

Where URL is the URL of the video to be downloaded.

If you only want the audio, the command would be:

yt-dlp -x –audio-format mp3 URL

And that’s it.