How to open a macOS Terminal in the current Finder folder

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: April 25, 2023

Apple/macOS Terminal/Finder tip: This tutorial shows how to open a Mac Terminal window in the current Finder folder by using AppleScript.

AppleScript code to open a Terminal in the current Finder folder

For a while I have wanted to be able to open a Mac Terminal window in the same directory as the Mac Finder folder that I’m currently looking at. I couldn’t find any other way to do this, so I finally wrote an AppleScript script to do it. Fortunately the script code is relatively readable. Here's the code:

tell application "Finder"
    set myWin to window 1
    set thePath to (quoted form of POSIX path of (target of myWin as alias))
    tell application "Terminal"
        activate
        tell window 1
            do script "cd " & thePath
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

When I have a Mac Finder window in the foreground and run this script from the AppleScript menu on the macOS menubar, it opens a new Mac Terminal window, and automatically places me in the same directory as the current Finder folder. Sweet.

Putting the script in the right location

Here in April, 2023, I named this file OpenTerminalInFinderDir.scpt, and put it in either /Library/Scripts/AlsScripts or ~/Library/Scripts/AlsScripts. When you combine this with enabling AppleScript in the Mac menubar (see the link below), the result looks something like this:

I’m too lazy to provide a new screen snapshot today, but here in 2023, my OpenTerminalInFinderDir.scpt script appears at the bottom of a similar-looking menu on the menubar.