Terminal emulator

A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty X).]] A terminal emulator will generally start the default shell that is defined as the login shell for given user. On Gentoo the default shell is bash.

If an X environment has not been set up 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. The key (often the "windows key" on many keyboards) will also toggle between terminals.

If an X environment has been set up, there are more than a few terminal emulator options available for the user to choose from - see next section. From an X11 session, the Linux virtual terminals can be accessed with ++ through ++ key combinations. If the X11 session was started from a session manager, it is often started on tty7. Return to it by pressing ++, otherwise return to the graphical session by going back to the virtual terminal on which it was started.

Available software
Popular terminal emulators include:

Additional terminal emulators can be found in the category.

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 command.

When using bash, the shell can be cleared and redrawn by pressing + (lower case L).

External resources

 * https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php - Detailed history of the TTY.