Terminal, Command Line, and Associated Concepts
These are some related ideas, easy to conflate. Terminal Emulator (aka, Terminal) When people say “terminal”, they mean the terminal emulator. Terminals used to be a physical thing in the days of yore when computers were the size of houses. Terminal emulators (like Alacritty, Konsole, Windows Terminal, etc.) render a screen with a command line the way these old terminals used to provide. Command Line The command line is the literal line in the terminal emulator which accepts commands as inputs. Commands in a terminal emulator are usually written in a ’language’ like Bash, PowerShell, and POSIX sh. However, command lines can also be for other types of languages: Java, C, Python, R, etc. For instance, you can be in a terminal emulator typing Bash commands like pwd and ls on the command line, but then you type the command python and enter the python command line. ...