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Originally Posted by
theKbStockpiler
I see these terms used all the time with hardly any distinction between the two.
Isn't one, really. Terminal's probably the more "technically correct" term but they both make sense.
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I could only get emacs to open in console so I was also wondering what are the common applications to use in console.
Anything that demands user interaction and isn't a graphical program naturally has to be in a terminal, since a terminal is
the way to get interactive information from the user. Editors(nano, vi, emacs) need a terminal if you're not using a graphical version of them, and login systems in particular (su, sudo, ssh, scp, sftp)
demand a terminal of one sort or another.
Shells
can use terminals, when available, to give you an interactive prompt, but are quite capable of running noninteractively and without a terminal too, when running shell scripts.
I'd also point out a small but important distinction; quite a few utilities couldn't care less whether you run them in a terminal, a GUI, or no environment at all. They just do their job and don't even worry about where they are or why. Unless the command interacts with you somehow, you can be relatively sure it falls into this category... Commands like
cp and
mv and
awk and a blizzard of other common utilities fall into that category.
So it's not really a different "kind" of program, just programs using the resources available to them in different ways.