macOS Tahoe: where is my Terminal?

– Image generated by Google Gemini.

Take macOS Tahoe, updated to version 26.0 Developer Beta 2, and open the Terminal. Actually, don’t just open one Terminal; open two, three, four different Terminals, each in its own tab. More or less like this:

Now tell me: which is the active Terminal?

In order to answer you need to look closely. Only then you will notice that the title bar of the active Terminal has a slightly darker background and that the title itself is in bold.

Do the same with Sequoia, or any other previous version of macOS, and the Terminal in use will be apparent at first glance.

Actually, there is also a way to tell which Terminal is active in Tahoe, but it is counterintuitive and requires the use of the mouse. If you hover the mouse over the active tab, nothing changes visually,

while, when you move the mouse over an inactive tab, its background gets darker.

To many, it may seem like a minor detail, but the Terminal is an essential tool for interacting with the operating system at a low level. Those who use it can’t afford to waste time figuring out which panel is the right one, nor can they risk running a dangerous command in the wrong Terminal.

To give a practical example: for managing this blog, I use three different Terminal panels, each of which is dedicated to a specific task. In one panel, I work via ssh on a test site, which I use to check that everything works properly before uploading the blog to the live server. Since this is only a test environment, I’m accustomed to wiping everything out with the command rm -r *. I can do that without worry because I can tell at a glance that I’m in the right Terminal, without even reading. However, with Tahoe, I’ll have to change my habits because running that same command in the wrong Terminal could have catastrophic consequences.

Among all the inconsistencies in macOS Tahoe, this is perhaps the most baffling. And potentially the most dangerous.

At this point, one can’t help but wonder: do Apple’s developers actually use the products they create?