Comment by hnlmorg

Not really no. I’ve been using shells and authoring new ones for around 40 years across a variety of platforms. The term has always been pretty loosely defined because as technology evolved the term “shell” was borrowed. So like I said, a shell can refer to a graphical core just as much as a text-based one. You can get web shells too.

The original intent was that a shell is a thin wrapper on top of the OS to expose the hosts capabilities. But that hasn’t been an apt description for most of those 40 years.