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While everyone fights about Electron I have a slightly off topic question- why are programs like these called a terminal emulator (emphasis on emulator)?

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A physical "terminal" is a piece of hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100

I think people also refer to a "terminal" as one of the virtual terminals (CTRL+ALT+F[1-9]) that Linux provides.

But yeah, people use the term to mean different things.

These “virtual” terminals of course are also emulations of the original hardware terminals.

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