Before your cursor there is a short line of text. It is called the , and it is the terminal telling you three things without being asked.
A typical one looks like this:
~ $
Small, but it says: you are in your home folder, and the terminal is ready for input.
The two halves
Everything before the cursor is the terminal talking to you. Everything after it is yours.
That sounds obvious until you paste a command from a tutorial and accidentally include the $. The dollar sign is not part of the command. It is a punctuation mark meaning “your turn”.
Note
The exact shape differs by machine. On a Mac you often see user@laptop ~ % or ~ $. On Windows it looks like C:\Users\user>. Different paint, same three facts: who, where, ready.
Quick check
A tutorial shows the line `$ ls`. What do you actually type?
The most useful part: where
The ~ is shorthand for your home folder — the folder that belongs to you, where your documents and projects live. When you open a terminal, that is where you start.
Move somewhere else and the prompt follows you:
~ $
~/projects $
~/projects/my-site $
You have not run anything yet, but you can already see the single most common source of beginner errors disappearing: “I ran the right command in the wrong folder.” The prompt tells you the folder for free, on every single line.
Quick check
Your prompt reads `~/projects/my-site $`. Where are you standing?
Try it
The terminal knows who you are. Ask it.
Type this and press Enter:
whoami
It answers with your username. In this simulator that is user, which is also why your home folder is /home/user.
Tip
whoami is a good first command for a reason: it takes no arguments, changes nothing, and cannot go wrong. When you land in an unfamiliar terminal and want to check that it is actually listening, this is the harmless thing to type.
Quick check
Why is whoami a safe command to try in an unfamiliar terminal?