CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowspowershellterminalcommand-line-interface
Noob
Noob

Reputation: 157

Are Command Prompt and PowerShell terminal emulators?

I have read in Codecademy that

To access the command line, we use a terminal emulator, often just called the terminal.

This gave me the impression that PowerShell and Command Prompt are terminal emulators but when I checked the list of terminal emulators for windows I found the following list in Wikipedia. I would really appreciate it if anyone can help me understand what terminal emulators are, what PowerShell and Command Prompt are, How these things are different. Thank you!

Upvotes: 5

Views: 1858

Answers (1)

mklement0
mklement0

Reputation: 437176

Terminal emulators are applications that emulate the behavior of character-oriented hardware terminals from the early days of computing. For all practical purposes, the Windows Console is an instance of a terminal emulator, as is its modern successor, Windows Terminal.

Typically, the applications that run inside these emulators are interactive shells[1] such as PowerShell and cmd.exe, which act as command-line interpreters, which enable running other applications as well as commands built into those shells and scripts written for those shells.

[1] On Windows, somewhat confusingly, the term shell is also used for the graphical (GUI) shell that provides the Windows desktop and File Explorer. Overall, however, the term shell usually refers to terminal-, character-based shells, such as the POSIX-like shells in the Unix world (a prominent example of which is Bash), and to PowerShell on Windows, as its name implies; while the term conceptually also applies to cmd.exe, historically it hasn't been used much in that context.

Upvotes: 5

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