Job control is a feature in your shell that allows you to manage processes by moving them between three states: foreground, background, and stopped. It includes commands like fg, bg, Ctrl+z, jobs, kill, disown, and wait. Fish, bash, and zsh all support job control, but it can be used differently in each shell. Some people prefer job control over using terminal tabs because they like to see all their terminals on the screen at the same time. It can be useful for killing processes that don't respond to Ctrl+C, running GUI apps or CPU-hungry programs in the background, and for setting up environment variables for multiple commands. Job control can also be necessary in situations where you're in single-user mode or SSH'd into a machine without tmux or screen.