Yesterday I was fortunate enough to speak with some high school programmers. They had messed around with the school terminal program on all of the library’s macs to the point where our tech people blocked Terminal from use.

Most mac users fail to see what a powerful application Terminal really is. You can use it for networking, writing Perl code, and just about everything else. DOS (Windows) has a similar command-line, but the commands are different than that of Unix (mac).
Today, I found one of my favorite commands:

“defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES”

I found it at Mac OS X tips, along with a couple others.

What this command allows you to do is take Dashboard widgets and put them on your desktop, which is pretty cool.

To get this command to work, you have to:

1) enter it in Terminal
2) enter “killall Dock”
3) press F12, click and hold on a widget, and press F12 again.
4) enjoy your favorite widgets on your desktop

When using Terminal, be sure to exercise caution, it is a very powerful application that you don’t want to enter the wrong command in.