[2] As a terminal emulator, the application provides text-based access to the operating system, in contrast to the mostly graphical nature of the user experience of macOS, by providing a command-line interface to the operating system when used in conjunction with a Unix shell, such as zsh (the default interactive shell since macOS Catalina[3]).

[4][5] The preferences dialog for Terminal.app in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and later offers choices for values of the TERM environment variable.

Available options are ansi, dtterm, nsterm, rxvt, vt52, vt100, vt102, xterm, xterm-16color and xterm-256color, which differ from the OS X 10.5 (Leopard) choices by dropping the xterm-color and adding xterm-16color and xterm-256color.

These include the ability to use the standard macOS Help search function to find manual pages and integration with Spotlight.

[citation needed] Terminal was used by Apple as a showcase for macOS graphics APIs in early advertising of Mac OS X,[citation needed] offering a range of custom font and coloring options, including transparent backgrounds.