Terminal, Shell, Console and Prompt: Telling Them Apart and the Right Setup for Each OS
The terminal emulator draws the window, the shell interprets the line you type, and the PTY in between carries keys and signals; they are separate programs, so you install and update them separately. We show with a real experiment which settings file bash, zsh and PowerShell read and when, and give a decision table for PowerShell 7.6 + Windows Terminal + WSL 2 on Windows and zsh on macOS, plus where the repo should live.
14 Nov 2026
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13 min
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2
