terminal

Think of talking to your computer without a mouse. The terminal, also called the command line or shell, is a window where you type commands and see their output.

It is the quickest way to start servers, install tools, run tests, and check logs. Many instructions in this course are copy and paste lines for the terminal.

You run commands from a folder, so being in the right directory matters. Common tasks here include starting Expo, running git, a source control tool, and installing packages with npm or pnpm, which are tools that download code.