Ads in Terminal

For all my engineering friends, I’m sorry. For all my non-engineering friends, you might not get this one.

Terminal is an application that comes by default with every Mac computer. It’s a command line interface with MacOS. Basically, it lets you talk to your computer directly. In the Stone Age, CLIs and text-based interfaces were the primary way to use a computer. Obviously, we have transcended this and now primarily rely on graphics-based interfaces, but many engineers use Terminal on a regular basis. As I dipped my toes into the wild world of code, I too booted up Terminal to run some Firebase tasks for an app I was working on.

An app like Terminal is simple. You have text, and sometimes that text can be different colors when you’re working with Firebase for example. However, what if we started to think about this visual real estate as a place where ads could live?

Given how much focus is required when trying to do engineering work, this is a nightmare to think about ads being interspersed in your code. It’s one thing if there’s a big visual banner like in this example, but a text-only ad would likely be even more insidious and difficult to find.

Regardless, I hope this never gets built. If Apple gets desperate though, they just might…

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