in my understanding: “shell” is kind of a loosely defined term in this context, but i just think of it as a textual interface to the whole system. really it’s

in my understanding: “shell” is kind of a loosely defined term in this context, but i just think of it as a textual interface to the whole system. really it’s just a program that accepts text commands (or scripts) and performs actions on the system or launches other programs, and manipulates and displays the results. eg: sh bash zsh fish xonsh “terminal” is pretty well defined as a graphical UI program which presents you with the shell of your choosing (historically related to teletype or whatever) eg: xterm Terminal.app Konsole iTerm alacritty for the most part you can use any terminal with any shell, so the terms kind of coalesce into the more generic idea of a “command line” also all of this is for unix-like systems, eg linux macos bsd. windows is... well windows hope this makes sense!