The easiest way to start Terminal is to use the applications menu of your desktop; for Xfce, point your mouse cursor to the desktop, press the right mouse button and choose System → Terminal.

You can also start Terminal from a command line or from the Application launcher. Just hit Alt-F2, type Terminal and click the button Execute.

When you start Terminal for the first time, the application opens a terminal window with default settings.

When you first start Terminal

The terminal window displays a command prompt where you can type UNIX commands. The command prompt may vary depending on the configuration of your shell. The cursor is positioned at the command prompt. When you type a UNIX command and press Return, the computer executes the command. By default, Terminal will use the login shell of the user who starts the application (/bin/bash in case of a default Linux installation).

Terminal sets the following environment variables for the command running inside the terminal window:

TERM

Set to xterm or xterm-color, you can configure the value from the preferences dialog.

COLORTERM

Set to xfce4-terminal by default.

DISPLAY

Set to the X11 display of the terminal by default.

WINDOWID

Set to the X11 window identifier of the terminal by default.

Terminal provides a tab feature that enables you to open several terminals within a single window. Each terminal is opened in a separate tab. Click on the appropriate tab to display the terminal in the window. Each tabbed terminal in a window is separate sub-process, so you can use each terminal for a different task.

Working with multiple terminals

See the section Usage for information about how to open a new tabbed terminal.

You can close a terminal tab by clicking on the close button in the terminal tab header or by choosing File → Close Tab from the menubar.