View text files in Terminal on Mac (2024)

FAQs

How to display text files in Mac Terminal? ›

To look at the contents of a text-based configuration file, use cat or less . Generally, you'll use less because it has more options (such as searching). To use less , enter the command name followed by the name of the file you want to view.

Use Text settings in Terminal to change the font, text, color, and cursor options for a Terminal window profile. To change these settings in the Terminal app on your Mac, choose Terminal > Settings, click Profiles, select a profile, then click Text.

In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose File > Open. Select the document, then click Open. If your document is stored in iCloud Drive, you can select TextEdit in the iCloud section of the sidebar, then double-click your document. See Use iCloud Drive to store documents.

In the Windows Command shell, type is a built in command which displays the contents of a text file. Use the type command to view a text file without modifying it. In PowerShell, type is a built-in alias to the Get-Content cmdlet, which also displays the contents of a file, but using a different syntax.

On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Accessibility in the sidebar. Click Display, scroll down to Text, then click “Text size.” Drag the slider to the right to increase the text size on the desktop, in app sidebars, and in the apps listed (if they are set to Use Preferred Reading Size).

Use the ls command to display the contents of a directory. The ls command writes to standard output the contents of each specified Directory or the name of each specified File, along with any other information you ask for with the flags.

How to open a text file from Mac terminal? ›

In the Terminal app on your Mac, invoke a command-line editor by typing the name of the editor, followed by a space and then the name of the file you want to open. If you want to create a new file, type the editor name, followed by a space and the pathname of the file.

The cat command is the simplest way to view the contents of a file. It displays the contents of the file(s) specified on to the output terminal. Sometimes, we might want to number the lines in the output.

Use two right angle brackets to append output from a command to a file. In addition to using file redirection, you can also redirect the output of one command to the input of another using the vertical bar character, or pipe.

To locate a string within a file, use the grep tool. The grep tool searches the named input files for lines containing a match to the given pattern. By default, grep prints the matching lines.