Terminal

Terminal is a utility from Apple that is included with all Mac computers running macOS (formerly Mac OS X). Terminal provides access to a shell to communicate with the Darwin kernel within macOS, derived from BSD Unix.

Functions
Using Terminal, the user can manipulate files and folders, monitor processes, run applications and just about anything else that can be done in the GUI by typing text commands which are essentially tiny Unix applications that do a specific task.

History
Terminal dates back to NeXTSTEP 0.8 (a predecessor to Mac OS X) and had used bash as its shell since Mac OS X 10.0. With the release of macOS 10.15 (Catalina) in 2019, the default shell was switched to zsh, though this can be customized to suit the user's preferences.