Terminal (Terminal.app) is the terminal emulator included in the OS X operating system by Apple.Terminal originated in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, the predecessor operating systems of OS X.As a terminal emulator, the application provides text-based access to the operating system, in contrast to the mostly graphical nature of the user experience of OS X, by providing a command line interface to the operating system when used in conjunction with a Unix shell, such as bash.The preferences dialog for Terminal.app in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) offers choices for values of the TERM environment variable.