This is Gentoo's testing wiki. It is a non-operational environment and its textual content is outdated.
Please visit our production wiki at https://wiki.gentoo.org
Terminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty emulates a video terminal within another display architecture (usually X). It starts up with the default commandline shell that is defined as login shell for that user. On Gentoo the default shell is bash.
If an X environment has not been setup 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 setup, there are more than a few terminal emulator options available for the user to choose between.
Available software
Popular terminal emulators include:
| Title | Package | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| GNOME Terminal | x11-terms/gnome-terminal | The default terminal emulator for GNOME. |
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.