I need the shell tag, and terminal tag.... please, remove the synonym

Question

There are couple of questions that without the shell tag are incorrectly tagged and power users might get frustrated because of this:

• What are shells?
• Command history (previous and next command) in ngspice (migrated today, ngspice has an interactive shell mode)
• Change the color of the terminal (this asks how to change the terminal colors in the shell (most likely bash))

I'm sure there are more out there. I haven't found the exact reasons why shell and terminal where merged (the later happened even though the consensus was not to merge terminal).

Answer 1

I'm not yet convinced. I'm familiar with what each of the three terms mean but I'm struggling to see why they should all exist as separate tags here.

• What does shell (or cli-shell shudder) add that command-line doesn't already cover?
• If it adds anything, wouldn't the actual shell tags add even more? (eg: bash, ksh, zsh, etc)
• And why does terminal need its own tag at all? It's used synonymously with command-line by a very many people. It's possible the most worthwhile synonym we have in the system.

They're all pretty generic and they overlap huge amounts. I think in their case it's much more useful to have one tag to describe that we're talking about the command line and anything else be specific to the problem.

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And to agree with Marco, "shell" is and has been super-generic term for "interface" for a very long time. I'll concede it's more popularly talked about when describing the command line these days... But that's not its only use. And that's the problem with shell/terminal/command-line.

I don't disagree with Gilles's 2010 opinion (the three words all technically mean disparate things), but people don't use tags based on their dictionary definitions, they use them how they've always used them. And in the real world, terminal, shell, cli and command-line all mean roughly the same thing. Like it or not, they are synonymous to most of our users.

To separate these three out means one thing for the future of posts about the command line: really crappy tagging. Some posts will be terminal, some will be command-line and shell... It's just generating a metric butt-tonne of review. At least with the way things are, we have one tag that covers all of that and people can add detail through further, more specific tags.

Answer 2

They should be separated tags. If users are confused about their use is our responsibility to guide users into the light. That most of the users don't recognize the differences between them and we leave them like that just promotes the confusion in all the users that has the right to know how each of the parts of their system is called and will facilitate the exchanging of information between the users to answer and ask questions.

A fine tag excerpt and tag wiki explaining in plain english what are the uses of each tag and how to use them will be beneficial.

No other SE site merged command-line, shell and terminal. Both Super User and Unix & Linux use separated tag and command line is present only in 5% of the terminal and shell tags in SU; and in U&L only 10% of the tags has relationship.

Answer 3

Because the shell tag is almost a meta tag if you're talking about "Desktop Environments" (Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE, etc). As such if you want to refer to a shell, it should be the specific shell.