Terminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty [[Article description::emulates a video terminal within another display architecture (usually X).]] It starts up with the default shell that is defined as login shell for given user. On Gentoo the default shell is bash.
If an X environment has not been set up in Gentoo, the system will boot to the first tty interface. Under most circumstances it is possible to access different terminal interfaces by pressing the Alt+F1 through Alt+F6 keys on the keyboard.
If an X environment has been set up, there are more than a few terminal emulator options available for the user to choose among.
Available software
Popular terminal emulators include:
| Title | Package | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Alacritty | x11-terms/alacritty | GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. |
| XTerm | x11-terms/xterm | The default terminal emulator for X.org. |
| lxterminal | lxde-base/lxterminal | The standard terminal emulator of LXDE. |
| rxvt-unicode | x11-terms/rxvt-unicode | Light in resource usage, fast, and more feature-rich (tabs, transparency, Unicode, etc.). |
| st | x11-terms/st | simple terminal implementation for X . |
| xfce4-terminal | x11-terms/xfce4-terminal | The default terminal emulator for the Xfce desktop environment. |
| terminology | x11-terms/terminology | The default terminal emulator for Enlightenment. |
| Konsole | kde-apps/konsole | The default terminal emulator for KDE / Plasma. |
| Yakuake | kde-apps/yakuake | Quake-style (drop-down) terminal emulator based on Konsole for KDE / Plasma. |
| GNOME Terminal | x11-terms/gnome-terminal | The default terminal emulator for GNOME. |
| Guake | x11-terms/guake | Drop-down terminal emulator for GNOME. |
Additional terminal emulators can be found in the x11-terms category.
Troubleshooting
Display garbled after binary output
On occasion the text in the terminal emulator will become garbled. This generally happens if binary output is displayed to standard out. This can easily be fixed by typing the reset command.