Windows Terminal is a user interface - the input and the display - that can be used for interacting with a wide variety of shells, such as those listed above. The word “terminal” in the app’s name is significant in that it recognizes the distinction between a console, a shell, and a terminal. To provide a more modern experience in these various tools and to introduce some uniformity in the user experience across shells, Microsoft has released a Microsoft Store app called Windows Terminal. In the course of a typical week, a software developer working in Windows 10 may find herself/himself running commands in cmd.exe, Windows PowerShell, git bash, the Azure Cloud shell, or a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) shell. Unix/Linux users are used to the power and composability of shells such as ksh, bash, or zsh. Due to its limitations, alternatives like 4DOS were developed. Longtime users of MS-DOS will remember (maybe not fondly) the “” command shell. A software developer’s preferred terminal in which to run command-line commands and scripts is a matter of personal preference.

Windows terminal linux shell