The issue I am facing:
I cannot, for the life of me, find how to access the command line. I can find tons of info about it but not how to evoke it. So where is it hiding?
Details about my system:
Diet Pi running on a Dell 3040
What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:
Haven't changed anything, just keep Gravity updated.
I'm assuming your diet pi is headless and if so when you ssh into the dietpi your in the terminal already.
If the diet pi is connected to a monitor and keyboard but has no gui your also already in the terminal ( once you login ).
Lastly if there is a minimal gui there should be a "terminal" app of some kind and thats going to depend on the desktop enviorment you chose to install.
How is the diet pi setup?
Yea, it's headless but I can access the GUI from a remote computer.
I've searched all over for a terminal app but can't find one. Guess I need to learn how to ssh. 
I can ssh to the password prompt but it doesn't accept any password and or user name I try. I know the password is correct because I can remote into the GUI just fine. I also tried the default PW and every combo I could think of.
Somebody must know the secret. Please help.
Make sure when you ssh you are specifying the user name of the dietpi. If you don't it will assume its your host machine and the password will be invalid.
So, if your diet pi user name is "pi" and the ip for the diet pi is 192.168.0.2 then your ssh command would be ssh pi@192.168.0.2
The login name is "pi.hole". Don't remember choosing this but it doesn't matter, still no joy.
i also tried from a Windows box and got the "Placeholder" message which makes no sense because I can access the web page from my linux box just fine. I also tried getting in via Putty but got the same pw issue.
pi.hole would not be the user but rather a local name for the pihole itself. According the the DIetpi setups I've seen the default user is root. so try root as the user name.
Your question is related to your OS rather than Pi-hole.
It sounds as if you only remember the password for Pi-hole's web UI.
Your OS would require completely separate credentials.
If you can't remember those, you'd have to start over with a fresh OS image and reinstalling Pi-hole.
The two users available for login by default are root and dietpi. On first boot/login, the default password, if you did not change it prior to first boot via /boot/dietpi.txt, is dietpi, but you are offered to change it via console UI dialog during the first run setup process.
If you really forgot the password to login with any of the two users, there would be some way to create an auto-login config, accessing the root drive/filesystem from another Linux machine, or if there is no way to attach a screen and keyboard, an SSH key for either of the two users, so you can reset passwords from there.
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