Terminal Glossary

Browse 6 terminal terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

6 Terminal Terms

Screen Buffer
A region of memory that holds the character or pixel data representing what is currently displayed (or about to be displayed) on a screen, commonly used in...
Shell
A command-line interpreter that reads user input (or scripts), parses it into commands, expands variables and globs, and executes programs — with common...
Terminal Hacker Aesthetic
A visual style built around terminals, green or amber text, monospace typography, command-line interfaces, and retro hacker imagery. It is often used in...
tmux
A terminal multiplexer that lets you create, split, and manage multiple terminal sessions within a single window, persist them across SSH disconnects, and...
TTY
Short for teletypewriter, a TTY is a terminal device interface in Unix-like systems that provides line-buffered, character-oriented I/O between a user and the...
Zsh
The Z Shell — an extended Bourne-compatible shell that became the default login shell on macOS starting with Catalina. It offers powerful features over bash...

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