Examples of shells include PowerShell, Bash and cmd.Ĭonsole. It takes the commands from the user and executes them.

The shell does the actual work derived from the terminal. The terminal listens for keyboard input and ships it to the shell then outputs the shell's response for the user.

The terminal does not do any heavy lifting it facilitates the communication between the user and the shell. Today, the terminal, more accurately the terminal emulator, is essentially a wrapper for the shell. Closest to the user is the terminal, which originates from mainframe terminology where the terminal - a physical keyboard and monitor - connected the user to the mainframe. The nomenclature comes from the earliest days of computing and some people will use them interchangeably, but it helps to know the terminology to keep everything straight.

Some newcomers to the IT world might be confused by the terms console, shell and terminal. Get back to basics: What are consoles, shells and terminals? Announced at Microsoft Build in May 2019 and released during Build 2020 in May 2020, the Windows Terminal is a powerful and awesome open source terminal that warrants a closer inspection from IT workers who find traditional command-line tools for Windows lacking.

Powershell serial terminal