whatis terminal-emulator
Terminal Emulator
Also known as: terminal, console
A graphical app that emulates a hardware text terminal, giving you a window in which a shell runs. Examples: GNOME Terminal, Konsole, Alacritty.
What Is a Terminal Emulator in Linux?
A terminal emulator handles drawing text, colors, fonts, scrollback, and keyboard input. It opens a pseudo-terminal and starts your shell attached to it.
Features like tabs, splits, ligatures, and GPU rendering belong to the terminal emulator, while prompts, aliases, and completion belong to the shell. A terminal multiplexer such as tmux adds persistent sessions on top of either.
Learn more about Terminal Emulator
- screen vs tmux: Which Terminal Multiplexer Why a multiplexer keeps your session alive when SSH drops, where screen still wins, and how to reattach to the session you left running last week.
- tmux Basics for Beginners tmux lets you run terminal sessions that survive disconnects and split a single terminal into multiple panes. This guide covers sessions, windows, panes, and the detach/reattach workflow that makes tmux essential for remote work over SSH.