Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu

Kang — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:48:34 +0000

Ever find it annoying that you can’t go from the terminal to the same directory in the finder or vice versa on the Mac? So am I! It just seems terribly inefficient for power users who are proficient with the terminal to have to open up the terminal app and then manually cd into the current directory. Aside from just a waste of time and extra keystrokes (yes, tab to auto-complete does help a lot), it’s not easy to remember the exact path to the current directory. On top of that, OS X likes to make it harder for regular users to access root folders and it becomes a pain to use. I finally gave up and googled for solutions to go from finder to terminal today and found a great time-saver: Enhanced Open Terminal Here.

To install Open Terminal Here, unzip the downloaded file and store in a place that you won’t accidentally delete. Then right click (or if you don’t have a two button mouse, Ctrl+click) on the toolbar area of a finder window and select “Customize Toolbar…”. This brings up the toolbar customization dropdown. Now drag and drop the Open Terminal Here icon to the existing toolbear area and click done. You can now open a terminal window to the same location as where you are in the finder. For more convenience, cmd+click to open the current folder in a new tab in terminal or alt+click to cd into the current directory on the foremost tab of the foremost window in terminal. You can read up more about this cool script at Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu.

Mac finder window with Open Terminal Here installed

So what about the other way around of going from the current directory in terminal to finder? This is pretty simple, all you need to do is enter: “open .”

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Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu