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> cmd.exe is a terminal emulator

Isn't Windows Console the (old) terminal emulator, with cmd.exe being just the command-line interpreter.

Yeah, conhost.exe is the old terminal emulator effectively (cmd.exe being a shell).

Before that, csrss.exe handled terminal emulation (which is why console windows weren't themable[1]).

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071231-00/?p=23...

This is mixing up cmd.exe which is the dos-like (but not dos) scripting interpreter, and conhost.exe which is the actual old terminal emulator/console that the kernel would spin up whenever you ran cmd.exe.

cmd.exe can be used with shitload command line utilities and is a full blown scripting language just less powerful than Unix bash. The analogy works just fine.