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A terminal emulator inside a graphical user interface is often called a terminal window. A terminal window allows the user access to a command-line interface (or occasionally a character-based application) which may be running either on the same machine or on a different one via telnet, ssh, or dial-up. On Unix-like operating systems it is common to have one or more terminal windows connected to the local machine, but on more graphically-oriented machines the remote use is more common.

Example programs providing the remote-access form of terminal emulation under Microsoft Windows include the built-in programs HyperTerminal and Microsoft's telnet client, as well as 3rd party programs like PuTTY, SSH Secure Shell, and SecureCRT. A so-called "DOS box" or "Command prompt" is the Windows equivalent of a locally-connected terminal window.

The ubiquitous UNIX terminal window is used for both local and remote access; where the connection goes is not the business of the terminal emulator itself. Many different terminal emulators are available for the X Window System - the most mature of the bunch are xterm, dtterm , and rxvt. Others include eterm , aterm , multi-gnome-terminal , and kterm .