After perusing the forums regarding terminal emulators I must express some dissatisfaction. I'm an old unix guy and I expect to have a command line on my system. On android you can open up debugging and run a shell over adb. But there isn't a basic xterm available on the system to do the exact same thing without a remote connection. Madness.

You can find all kinds of terminal emulators all over the place that want all kinds of crazy permissions and do all kinds of crazy things like installing large chunks of linux but it isn't easy to find a basic command line tool. I've been looking and haven't found one and I don't see anybody recommending one. Madness.

I assume there are security reasons for not making an xterm available but this is inconsistent with an easy path to connect and run adb. And good luck finding any technical discussion about this. Madness.

There are good reasons to have a command line. I ran top through adb shell and immediately noticed my VPN is eating CPU. And that's just the beginning. The GrapheneOS team has prudently refrained from recommending third party apps. But top is native. But I can't run it! Madness.

All of this started because - like many other people - I just want to install code like Google Play on a secondary user and use the primary user (Owner) to "install available apps" for other users - like any sysadmin would do. But I can't do that through the UX unless Owner installed Google Play - exactly what everybody wants to avoid! But I hear you can do it with pm - a shell command! But there's no command line! But you can do it remotely through adb! MADNESS.

If people want to make this a serious and usable thread about terminal emulators then great. Maybe it will serve as a reference. Otherwise I will have to make some compromises. Maybe I'll take a chance with one of these FOSS terminal emulators. Maybe I'll review the source code and perhaps strip out what I don't like - but probably not because I don't want to waste my time that way. I'll probably just cave in and use adb for now. But I hope that this or some other thread will produce the kind of answers that "we" expect - "we" being experienced IT people who don't like moving backwards or dealing with absurd headaches and roadblocks and timewasting. I just want my command line.