PowerShell is a shell - a program that takes input, does work, and returns output. Alacritty is a terminal - a container that transports user inputs to program

PowerShell is a shell - a program that takes input, does work, and returns output. Alacritty is a terminal - a container that transports user inputs to programs (like shells) and prints program outputs to the screen. The terminal owns the actual graphical window you interact with. The default terminal on Windows is the Windows Console. Windows comes with two shells, the Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and PowerShell. Both of these run on top of the Windows Console. There is also a new terminal in development by Microsoft, called the Windows Terminal. It's much more modern due to not having to be backwards compatible.