Terminal emulator

A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty emulates a video terminal within another display architecture (usually X). It starts up with the default commandline shell that is defined as login shell for that user. On Gentoo the default shell is bash.

If an X environment has not been setup in Gentoo, the system will boot to the first tty interface. Under most circumstances it is possible to access different terminal interfaces by pressing the Alt + F1 through Alt + F6 keys on the keyboard.

If an X environment has been setup, there are more than a few terminal emulator options available for the user to choose between.

Popular terminal emulators are:
 * XTerm: as default which comes with X.org, it is still used a lot.
 * rxvt-unicode: lighter in resource usage, fast and more feature-rich (tabs, transparency, Unicode, etc.).
 * xfce4-terminal: default terminal emulator for xfce
 * terminology: default terminal emulator for enlightenment
 * Konsole: default terminal emulator for KDE
 * GNOME Terminal: default terminal emulator for GNOME