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In the KDE menu in the Knoppix live CD, I saw there is a submenu somewhere with the title 'shells' and another with the title 'xshells'.

It sounded to me like they are two separate families of shells.

What is the difference between them?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 17 '13 at 14:22

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A shell is a command line application that prompts the user for commands and then executes those commands.

"X Shell" is another word for "terminal emulator". It's a graphical application that allows you to run a command line application inside it and thus allows you to execute command line applications in a graphical environment.

When you select an entry in the Shells menu, the selected shell will be started in your default terminal emulator/xshell. When you select an entry in the XShells menu, your default shell will be started in the selected terminal emulator.

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    But why isn't Konsole in the XShells menu? – H M Aug 17 '13 at 8:40
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    @HM I don't know. I would have expected it to be in there to be honest. – sepp2k Aug 17 '13 at 9:04

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