# Reading the prompt

Course: Terminal Basics — https://zero2vibecode.com/learn/terminal-basics
Canonical URL: https://zero2vibecode.com/learn/terminal-basics/0-2-reading-the-prompt

The short line before your cursor is not decoration — it tells you who you are and where you are standing.

Before your cursor there is a short line of text. It is called the **prompt**, 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".

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.

## 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.

## 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`.

`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.