When should you use one instead of the other?
What are the benefits of one over the other?
I assume you mean TTY. a tty is the default terminal linux boots into and displays. Then things like a display manager or a desktop environment cover it up, kinda like you’d open a program in full-screen. Use desktop terminal emulators if you have access to a desktop environment. If your desktop environment freezes, change tty and kill whatever is hanging your system, or gracefully stop whatever open programs you have and reboot.
Pretty much no reason nowadays to use a tty if you have a terminal emulator. Some people go above with their multitasking skills and start using terminal multiplexers and session managers, like tmux or screen that do both, or abduco that is a session manager and dvtm that is a terminal multiplexer. Some people just use whatever tools are available in the default shell installed (usually bash), like ctrl+z to put programs to sleep, job command to see what things are running, fg $n to bring to the foreground the program desired, with n being a number from the job command, bg $n to wake a program and run it in the background, and simply running commands and ending them with & sign, so that they get started in the background from the start.
Thank you for your response.
Only recently have started learning Linux programming. Recently started using wsl to replace cygwin. I have used vim for decades. Note: I prefer true Linux machine than wsl, since wsl crashes a lot BUT at work they drank the Microsoft koolad so I stuck with cygwin.
I have been going through a “GUI” detox program in my career and just getting extremely efficient in keyboarding without a mouse. Using a multiple desktops with vim and sometimes tmux mixed in.
I wanted to see if I could some how use F1-F6 terminals to increase my efficiency.
Programmer since the 70’s
1 Like
If you would be using Linux, the most efficient thing you could have done would be to move to a tilling WM. Maybe you can try launching i3, dwm or sway (the later being a wayland compositor) in WSL. I know WSL can launch programs, maybe it can also launch sway and you can just tile your windows and use a Linux desktop on Windows.