What Is a Terminal?

The two ways to talk to your computer

Right now, you’re using your computer through a graphical user interface (GUI). You click on icons, drag windows around, and use menus. It’s visual, intuitive, and how most people have always used computers.

But there’s a second way — one that’s been around even longer:

The terminal.

A terminal is a text-based interface where you type commands and your computer responds with text. No icons. No menus. Just you and your computer, having a conversation through typed messages.

The texting analogy

Here’s the simplest way to understand it:

Using a GUI is like talking to someone face-to-face — lots of gestures, pointing, visual cues.

Using a terminal is like texting them — you type exactly what you want, and they text back.

When you text a friend “send me that photo from last night,” they know exactly what to do. When you type ls in a terminal, your computer knows exactly what to do — it lists all the files in your current folder.

That’s it. That’s the whole concept.

Why do you need this?

Every LLM CLI tool — Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI — runs inside a terminal. There’s no other way to use them. They don’t have a website you visit or an app you download (yet). They live in the terminal.

So to become an orchestrator, you need to be comfortable with two things:

Opening a terminal
Typing commands in it

You don’t need to become a command line wizard. You need maybe 10-15 commands, and we’ll teach you every single one.

💡It's less scary than it looks

The terminal feels intimidating because of how it looks in movies — green text on black screens, hackers typing furiously. In reality, it’s just a text box where you type simple English-ish commands. If you can text, you can use a terminal.

What does it look like?

When you open a terminal, you’ll see something like this:

user@computer:~$

That’s called the prompt. It’s your computer saying “I’m ready — what do you want me to do?”

user — your username
computer — your computer’s name
~ — where you currently are (your home folder)
$ — the “I’m ready” symbol

You type a command after the $, press Enter, and the computer responds:

user@computer:~$ pwd
/home/user

pwd means “print working directory” — it tells you where you are in the filesystem. We’ll cover this in detail in lesson 3.

Key vocabulary

Before we go further, here are five terms you’ll hear constantly:

Term	What it means	Analogy
Terminal	The application/window you type commands in	Your texting app
Shell	The program that interprets your commands	The “brain” that reads your texts
Command	An instruction you type	A text message
Directory	A folder	Same as a folder on your desktop
Path	The “address” of a file or folder	Like a street address

ℹTerminal vs Shell — what's the difference?

The terminal is the window. The shell is the program running inside it. It’s like how Chrome (the window) runs a web engine (the program inside). Most of the time, you don’t need to think about this distinction — but if you see people mention “bash” or “zsh,” those are shell names.

What you’ll be able to do

By the end of this module (4 short lessons), you’ll be able to:

Open a terminal on any operating system
Navigate around your files and folders
Create, move, copy, and delete files
Feel confident when an AI tool says “run this command”

That’s the foundation. Once you have this, everything else — installing tools, running projects, deploying websites — becomes a matter of typing one or two commands.

KNOWLEDGE CHECK