What is Terminal?

2m read

·Nov 3, 2024

Hey guys, this is Matt Canzano. This is a video on what exactly Terminal is.

Now, some of you think anything you ever do in Terminal, like Emacs for instance, is Terminal itself doing all these things. They think that without Terminal, they wouldn't be playing Snake. But I did explain what Terminal really is.

Now, you see, Terminal is more of a window to Unix. Terminal just runs UNIX applications on your Mac. So, Emacs is an application, which is a UNIX application, and all Terminal does is open it up, pipe standard output of the program, and print it out to the Terminal window. It then lets keystrokes go back to the program. So, you're not actually using Terminal when you run Emacs; you're using Emacs. Emacs is just being displayed through Terminal.

I'll give an example by showing you the actual application that is Emacs, or something like that, and I'll show you that it's not actually Terminal. So right here is Emacs as an application. I'll just copy that and paste it onto my desktop, and it will open it up. It'll open with Terminal; right here it's displayed with Terminal, but what it really is is Emacs.

So, that's just an example. Terminal, like I said, is just a window to display anything you run. So, nothing is actually in Terminal except for this command line and anything you type, like read or set. Every other command is basically an application somewhere on the hard drive.

So, that's just a brief explanation of Terminal. So, don't say it's in Terminal; say it's on... it's running through Terminal.

So, thank you for watching! My kids are on subscribe.

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