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 + through + 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 include:

Display garbled after binary output
On occasion the text in the terminal emulator will become garbled. This generally happens if binary output is displayed to standard out. This can easily be fixed by typing the reset command.