Terminal
The black window that looks like a hacker movie.
What is Terminal?
Your computer has two ways to control it — clicking around with a mouse, or typing commands in a terminal. The terminal is just a text-based way to tell your computer what to do. When vibe coding tools say "run this in your terminal," they mean: open this app and type this text.
It looks intimidating at first, but most of the time you're just copying and pasting a single line. You don't need to memorize commands — the AI tells you what to type.
In Vibe Coding
In Cursor, the terminal is built into the editor — press Ctrl+` to open it. Lovable and Bolt hide the terminal from you entirely, but when you deploy to your own server or install packages locally, you'll need it.
Example
For example: Cursor tells you to run npm install. You open the terminal panel at the bottom of the editor, type npm install, press Enter, and the packages download automatically.