11 ms·

Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

• magios 4y ago
  xst, fork of suckless st https://github.com/gnotclub/xst https://github.com/gnotclub/xst
• lizknope 4y ago
  mrxvt It has tabs and hot keys to increase / decrease the font size
• bluedemon 4y ago
  I like Terminology. It has some pretty cool features as shown here: https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md
• bediger4000 4y ago
  Vanilla xterm. It uses a lot less resources than any other emulator. Thomas Dickey keeps it updated. It has an unusual, but usable scroll bar. You can configure cut-n-paste to help you with command line work. You can change what a "word" is for cutting/copying to include /, ., *, so working with Unix file names is easier.
  • kipari 4y ago
    Additionally, xterm starts quickly, has an incredibly responsive feel (the latency from keyboard press to a character appearing is lower than any other terminal emulator I've used) and looks absolutely stunning with a nice bitmap font.
  • camgunz 4y ago
    Agree xterm is a great terminal. It supports Unicode and all kinds of font and style configurations, uses few resources, and is really fast. Personally I found it to be the most responsive, better than (u)rxvt and st.
  • __d 4y ago
    I use plain xterm as well. With 6x13 aka 'fixed' bitmap font. Clean, simple, fast. I don't want background images, or transparency, or beautifully rendered fonts: I want to be able to clearly distinguish characters with minimum mental/visual effort, and pack as many of them into the available screen real-estate as I can see. I also turn off color highlighting, which I don't find useful (in a shell). My prompt is a simple '> ': no directory, no git, no venv -- I don't need to have that in my face all day long. Years ago, I also chose an unusual color scheme: yellow text and dark blue background. This is based on the observation that human visual acuity peaks in the yellow/orange, and troughs in the blue, and so yellow on blue takes the least effort to see.
    • exikyut 4y ago
      Not sure if you'll see this, but what are the hex colors of the fg/bg? That sounds really interesting.
    • nfhshy68 4y ago
      With `pwd`, `gb` and `gs` why do I need prompt taking up horizontal space?
      • nvllsvm 4y ago
        zsh has a built-in feature which shows the cwd aligned to the right end of the prompt line. It even disappears if you happen to type far enough into the line.
        • bediger4000 4y ago
          This is an underappreciated zsh feature for sure.
    • cycomanic 4y ago
      Just a note, but the sensitivity of human vision depends on the amount of light but generally peaks in the green/yellow, not the yellow/orange. This is actually the reason why some countries have changed the paint of emergency vehicles from red to greenish, they are much easier to see especially in the dark where we perceive red to be largely black. https://www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscope-resource/primer/lightandcolor/humanvisionintro/ https://www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscope-resource/p...
  • badsectoracula 4y ago
    xterm too, not for any special reason than it seems to be highly compatible (well, AFAICT it is basically a de-facto standard for all X terminals), very responsive, opens instantly and has zero frills. I mainly use Window Maker but whenever i use KDE (in other PCs mainly) i use konsole because it is just there. TBH my requirements for a terminal are minimal - a generous scroll back history, decent responsiveness and the ability to configure the window to remove any unnecessary frills (scrollbar aside) and i'm fine.
  • nfhshy68 4y ago
    +1 xterm. Terminal boot time is the only thing that matters to me when I open hundreds of them a day.
  • simonblack 4y ago
    Moi aussi. I usually launch my xterms from icons on the panel/taskbar/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Doing that actually launches scripts that use whole sets of specific parameters for the new xterm window. Thus, 'goroot' sets a largish xterm (115 x 58) with a right-hand scrollbar and reverse color and logs into the 'root' user. If you don't enter the root-user's password it will abort and disappear. And 'read.news' runs nothing but a text-based usenet-reader in an xterm, and has extra code to prevent more than one instance running.
    • smabie 4y ago
      You actually use usenet? why?
      • simonblack 4y ago
        Once upon a time, Usenet was THE reason I was connected to the Internet. These days, Usenet is a mere shadow of itself but many of the purely technical newsgroups still survive. Because I am an 8-bit CP/M enthusiast, I obviously subscribe to comp.os.cpm, but I also subscribe to some 'newer' active newsgroups like alt.os.linux.mint, and comp.os.linux.misc. Unfortunately, the other eight newsgroups I am subscribed to might have only one or two posts per year, if they're lucky.
• pmontra 4y ago
  Gnome Terminal because it's the default in Ubuntu and does what I need. I should give a try to kitty after I read about it here on HN weeks ago.
• katdork 4y ago
  wezterm, because it seems to have all the functions I want (ligatures, RGBA OSC, proper OSC support for base16) and is written in Rust, has sane configuration and nice platform support
• KMnO4 4y ago
  I use Kitty because it’s incredibly quick (especially with the -1 flag). I use a tiling window manager and can flood my screen with dozens of terminal windows in under a second. Probably not a big deal for most, but I mostly live in the shell. Kitty isn’t the best feature wise though. Even config changes are tedious.
• ivanjermakov 4y ago
  - Suckless' st for its launching speed and simplicity - Alacritty for better keycode support
  • systems_glitch 4y ago
    st as well. Works decent, is small.
    • trav4225 4y ago
      yup, same here.
• Zizizizz 4y ago
  https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/
  • spoiler 4y ago
    I want to second this! Wez term has great support for fonts, including ligatures, and it's configured/scripted via Lua; pretty neat. It's got a great ssh mode, too (with `wezterm ssh...`). It's got many great features. On Mac I currently use https://www.warp.dev/ https://www.warp.dev/ and I love the editor prompt feature! The search/ai is helpful sometimes (I use fish, so a bit less so, but fish makes up for it), and the cheat-sheet/template feature (forgot the name now) is cool, too!
• cjm42 4y ago
  xfce4-terminal, because I switched to Xfce when GNOME went on their "reinvent the UI" trek. I was happy with the UI I already had, thanks very much.
  • okl 4y ago
    Me too, but mostly out of laziness and because its good enough once you change the color scheme, disable the menu bar and reduce font size slightly. Also set a very large scrollback buffer.
  • infinet 4y ago
    Same here. Need its tabs since it is difficult to organize many terminal windows if use rxvt. I also use LXTerminal on the same machine. It's set to dark background to make flask's debug message easier to read. LXTerminal is very lite and adds very little(or no) additional dependence on Debian.
• pxc 4y ago
  I use tmux for all 'advanced' functionality, like scrollback and copy/paste, so I'm not picky as long as performance is good and basic features are present. The one thing is that I like to use a fullscreen dropdown terminal, so I do use Yakuake on KDE-based environments and Guake on GNOME-based ones.
• whalesalad 4y ago
  I use terminator.
  • myle 4y ago
    Ctrl+Shift+vErtical Ctrl+Shift+hOrizontal I just run Terminator in a window maximized and the above shortcuts and Ctrl+D when necessary are more than enough.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  I was a happy urxvt user for years, but switched to Alacritty[1] about a year or so ago. My main reasons for switching were wanting better emoji support (urxvt handles Unicode admirably, but not emoji) and wanting a better configuration language (I hate writing Xresource rules). I don't believe it's had a 1.0 release yet, but it's been stable in my use cases, and (perceptively) performant. [1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty
• smcn 4y ago
  Emacs with eshell for the most part. If I need something else, I'll use whatever comes with the DE, typically gnome term. It's alright. I don't mind it. It doesn't excite me. I used cool retro term for a week or two there for the nostalgia and it was nice but a bit much for daily work.
  • gorjusborg 4y ago
    eMacs/eterm is a very pragmatic choice. Having the terminal be supported anywhere eMacs runs should make for a very consistent experience.
    • smcn 4y ago
      Which is the great thing about having as many different systems exist in emacs, such as calendar, email, etc. However, the best thing about eshell is easily the fact that it will run lisp code. The same code that you use to program the editor can be used in shell commands. Great video should anyone be interested in eshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1f2tulD9N8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1f2tulD9N8
• peter-m80 4y ago
  Guake, for no reason. I tried it and fulfilled my needs.
  • bibaheu 4y ago
    Same here with Yakuake. It's always there
• jolmg 4y ago
  urxvt because of how light it is and because of its extensions, particularly the one for controlling the cursor with the keyboard. I often use it to do quick impromptu searches of the output of previous commands or to copy something. I also like the pseudo-transparency extension.
• t6jvcereio 4y ago
  Follow up, what's the Linux terminal with the lowest latency? What about the one with the highest thru put? Debian if that matters
  • jolmg 4y ago
    By latency, I guess you mean its launching speed? I like urxvt for that. I started using it back when I was on a netbook. So much quicker to launch than gnome-terminal or konsole. I didn't even need its daemon functionality which should be even quicker to open up windows. On throughput, I guess you mean its refresh rate? Among its many options, I remember there's one about skipping drawing content when it's coming in faster than urxvt is able to draw it, in order to not slow down the program writing to it. There may be more options that affect the refresh rate.
    • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Terminal latency is the delay between hitting a key and a glyph showing up on screen. There can be multiple layers of keyboard mapping and drawing APIs that slow this down compared to minimalistic terminal emulators from 30 years ago.
  • camgunz 4y ago
    A little out of date, but useful I think: https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ EDIT: Should say a lot of this is Mac
    • jolmg 4y ago
      Wasn't expecting to see st be on the slower end and emacs on the faster end.
• bravetraveler 4y ago
  I use Kitty! Mainly because I wanted something a bit snappier than Tilix but configurable to basically behave the same way -- built in panes, same shortcuts, and input broadcasting. The last one took a script, but I've been happy with it. An accelerated terminal is very helpful for watching tons of logs scroll by
• cbsks 4y ago
  Kitty is an amazing terminal if you are willing to spend some time to learn and customize it. Take a look at the screencast on its website, it is super powerful and will make your coworkers and friends jealous. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
  • nine_k 4y ago
    Kitty and Alacritty miss one feature which is key to me: assigning a separate color to bold face. I read a lot of output that only has bold face markup, like man pages or top output. They are way easier to read if bold face stands out more than, well, just thicker letter strokes. So I'm stuck with xfce4-terminal.
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      Those terminals support bold rendered using ANSI bright colors as a config option and then you can set the ANSI brights to whatever custom colors you prefer.
      • nine_k 4y ago
        Many thanks! I'll try this.
  • rgoulter 4y ago
    > if you are willing to spend some time to learn and customize it. What do you take time to learn/customize about kitty?
  • cookiengineer 4y ago
    I think the major benefit of why I stuck with kitty is that it removes somewhat the need for tilix and tmux, and also integrates nicely if you have a tiling wm only on one system but not the other (networked multihead, anyone?). The kitty.conf [1] is pretty powerful and allows a lot of customizations. It also has emoji support so you can make everything pretty in your PS1 :D [1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/
• lgeorget 4y ago
  I use Konsole when I use Plasma and urxvt when I use Xmonad. Konsole is a no-brainer, it comes with the desktop environment and I like the ctrl+/ctrl- shortcuts to change the font size. urxvt is more customizable, when I feel like it (that's also the case for Xmonad, now that I think about it).
• zatarc 4y ago
  Tilix: https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix
  • AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
    Me too, although as far as I can tell it's unmaintained at the moment.
• treffer 4y ago
  At some point I got hooked to kde konsole because it allows you to hide everything: hide the scroll bar, hide the menu, hide the tabs. Nothing but window decoration & a terminal. Oh and my terminal window is slightly transparent. There is a sweet spot where I can still read e.g. this text through the terminal (if need be) while not getting annoyed by the transparency. That plus I still have all the abilities of a "fancy" terminal emulator: tabs, large scroll window, hyperlink klicking, ....
• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Alacritty, because the config is simple YAML and it can display with zero window embellishments or other UI. It's great for tiling window managers in particular. The font rendering is great and you can adjust padding, margin, etc. to tweak readability for your tastes. I'm a fan of plain background with good contrast color, larger than normal font, and a clean one character wide padding around the terminal. It feels a lot like a web browser display. I hate terminals that go for the smallest possible font and super dense output.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • anonymzz 4y ago
    It's not supported ligurature. It's only problem i have.but I'm still using alacritty.
• camgunz 4y ago
  I used the terminal in gVim (:terminal). It's pretty close to xterm in terms of responsiveness, supports Unicode, and lets you avoid a multiplexer like GNU screen or tmux. Fallback is good old xterm (always have a fallback).
  • tomrod 4y ago
    Uninformed person here. Why is avoiding a multiplexer desirable?
    • camgunz 4y ago
      It's not really "avoiding", it's more like 1 less program to install, configure, run, learn keys for, and troubleshoot. I like both tmux and screen, but I personally don't need them anymore.
• dzek69 4y ago
  BTW, a little off topic, but... I wish something like Windows Terminal or ConEmu was available for Linux. After Windows 10 supports will end I'm going to switch to Linux again and I wanna cry because Linux tools almost always are so feature-less, buggy, unfinished or ugly. ShareX, Everything, terminals mentioned above. With 7+ taskbar tweaker even taskbar is much more powerful than any desktop environment I tested :(
  • haunter 4y ago
    Yeah ShareX has an absurd amount of features. Did you try Wine? Might work but not sure how friendly it is with X11/Wayland
  • qbasic_forever 4y ago
    What feature of Windows Terminal are you missing? It's been ages since I've used it but I can't think of anything I haven't seen in Linux terminal emulators. Gnome Terminal is the closest IMHO as it has custom profiles and colorschemes that are similar to what I remember from Windows. Pixel shaders are the only thing I can think that you won't commonly find in Linux terminals, but there is cool-retro-term for that kind of stuff.
    • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Mame has a VT100 emulator and you can enable shaders with that if you want scanlines and pincushion distortion.
      • qbasic_forever 4y ago
        Oh wow I had no idea they emulated a VT100. That's awesome!
• wef 4y ago
  foot - https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot Fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator. Features: * Fast * Lightweight, in dependencies, on-disk and in-memory * Wayland native * DE agnostic * Server/daemon mode * User configurable font fallback * On-the-fly font resize * On-the-fly DPI font size adjustment * Scrollback search * Keyboard driven URL detection * Color emoji support * IME (via text-input-v3) * Multi-seat * Synchronized Updates support * Sixel image support
  • mattpallissard 4y ago
    Came here to say this. nvim +term in tmux in foot.
  • tsujp 4y ago
    Also came here to say foot. Hands down the best terminal I've used. Kitty was alright but I prefer a bitmap font in terminals and I'd rather have one that just lets me use it without having to do tricks which you have to do with Kitty. Alacritty is also good but I don't care about X support at all.
  • anotherhue 4y ago
    Switched from alacrity to foot, very very pleased.
• mortenlarsen 4y ago
  Anything not based on libvte, it is like a CVE magnet.
• hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I previously used kitty and had no issue, but moved to gnome terminal as kitty chewed through VRAM pretty fast on my 4k monitor setup. I use too many terminals, but gnome terminal appeared to unload vmem when moving away from a workspace, kitty did not.
• justin_oaks 4y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but what are big differences between terminal emulators that push people to one vs another? Does making use of terminal multiplexer, like tmux or GNU screen, make some of those differences less important? I mostly use whatever terminal emulator is on my system. Currently that's xfce4-terminal. But I use GNU screen so I only ever have one terminal window open and I almost exclusively use the keyboard shortcuts for GNU screen instead of terminal shortcuts.
  • justin_oaks 4y ago
    Several people mentioned Kitty, so I looked at the screencast on the Kitty website to see what features Kitty has. While it has some neat features, like showing the current directory or the currently running command, I'm pretty sure that running tmux or GNU screen would break those features and most others. So it looks to me like you can use a fancy terminal emulator with cool features, or you can use a terminal multiplexer (tmux or GNU screen), but the two don't mix.
    • gh02t 4y ago
      I use Kitty with Tmux, no reason you can't. It's still a fast and simple terminal even without the other features.
  • CoolCold 4y ago
    I have 3 to 10 terminals open per virtual desktop on average. Screen/tmux lives inside each of them with 99.9% chance.
  • jakobnissen 4y ago
    I've chosen my terminal because it looks better, and renders font beautifully, and it is fast. I look at a terminal for hours a day, so looks matter. And there are several cli tools where I can see Gnome's built-in terminal lag. Other factors include whether it has built-in multiplexer so you don't have to deal with tmux, and picture-in-terminal support
• synergy20 4y ago
  gnome-terminal, universally installed, got the job done for me. tried kitty xterm konsole lxterminal(nice fonts) over the years, the default one wins. the gpu-based term(e.g. kitty) does have a nice feature, it can display images just like the old xterm, i hope gnome-terminal can do that one day.
• tristor 4y ago
  Terminator, every single time. Was a godsend when I was in Ops.
• zzo38computer 4y ago
  I use xterm. (However, there are some problems with it such as the pieces of big Sigma cannot be displayed (I think because it uses Unicode for conversion; you cannot just use fonts with the specific encodings directly, which I would prefer it to do), and some other problems; but it also has some advantages such as using Xaw and using bitmap fonts.) Maybe some time, I can write a better one, possibly. (One idea I have also is a kind of "secure universal escape", which might possibly use /proc file system if necessary, that would ensure that the state of the terminal is correct after the prompt is returned (and possibly also to check that the prompt is not being faked). The other idea is to not use Unicode.)
• lankenj 4y ago
  st. [1] Its simple and has everything I need, which is utf-8 support. Tabs and stuff i do via tmux. [1] https://st.suckless.org/ https://st.suckless.org/
• stuaxo 4y ago
  Tilix, basically a much more being able to do splitting etc from the GUI, and pretty standard Gtk view. It has optionally has CSD, which I'm a fan of (I know many are not, but I kind of like widgets in the toolbar, going buck to Amipro, and later Winamp)
• epakai 4y ago
  urxvt. It's very fast. I do a non-scientific benchmark of 'time find ~'. After repeats I see: urxvt=3.86s, alacritty=4.25s, kitty=7.62s, xterm=14.04s. (That xterm time feels suspect, I remember it being faster) Mostly it was an improvement over xterm. I setup runtime font size change, a perl script to open new terms in the same working directory, and scroll bar the way I like. On my newer setup for wayland I settled on alacritty (kitty was a competitor, X terms were out because fractional scaling results in blurry fonts). Neither option has a scrollbar which sucks, but I was able to get similar feature parity to urxvt.
  • mid-kid 4y ago
    I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down for even the slightest mention of urxvt. It feels like it was the One True Terminal for minimal desktops at one point, yet it's taken a backseat in the terminal wars. I'm sure it's mostly due to its default configuration trying to emulate xterm, making it behave and feel ancient. It's extremely efficient and surprisingly powerful with its perl scripting and plethora of extensions using it. I keep finding out about functionality I didn't know about, and much like vim, my usage of it has been evolving over the years. It really has no shortcomings to me, and I wish I could keep using it properly in Wayland. Everything else just feels either too tacky with its game-changing features or too minimal.
• gerdesj 4y ago
  Terminal emulator. When I boot my laptop or PC I get a graphical login (sddm) and a whizzy environment on login - KDE n that. I can hit CTRL-Fx and get a console, a terminal if you like. It does conform to some sort of standards but is it really an emulator? Emulating something implies a second rate experience and I don't think that applies here. My terminal is just fine. Now is my terminal a good one? Well we might have to consider the shell too because that is a major part of the text based console experience. I use BASH. I know that other shells exist and they have adherents (often quite vocal!) I've tried FISH and loved it but it isn't BASH which is available nearly everywhere. zsh, ksh etc are not bash but they are well supported so adherents are well served and we are all happy. So I run BASH in a konsole mostly. It's just something to run commands and get stuff done. I've tried funky extras that fiddled with git n that and changed the prompt and made my console life more productive. It doesn't really and simply slows it down. I like my shells to be unimaginative but reliable and my consoles to be pretty staid too. I like a bit of colour but not much more. Sorry, to answer your question: konsole.
  • JdeBP 4y ago
    Yes, the virtual terminals on Linux (and BSD) systems are emulators. They emulate actual, physical, terminals. You are incorrect in your inference of what the notion of emulation means, furthermore. Although not in general true of terminal emulators, unfortunately, other emulators are often superior experiences to the originals.
• t-3 4y ago
  XTerm. It's fast and it works. I wish it could be attached as a serial terminal like st though. Lately I've found that I'm more productive just dropping into a console with docs on an eReader though.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Gnu screen can connect to serial ports so you can use any terminal emulator as a serial terminal.
    • t-3 4y ago
      Yeah, it's just a convenience that isn't necessary at all. Moving between different systems can be annoying trying to find out if I have screen, cu, minicom etc, would be nice to just XTerm --serial /dev/ttyUSB0 or something.
• yakak 4y ago
  st because it is minimal and sufficient for tmux to do whatever it needs to do.
• ahmadraniri 4y ago
  Since I'm fully on wayland, so foot terminal is my choice. Sometimes I use vbeterm (gtk and vte based terminal), it works for both wayland and X11.
• nathanasmith 4y ago
  If I need a standalone window I reach for lxterminal. It's lightweight, modern enough looking, and does exactly what I need without any annoyance. Most of the time though I just use guake which as most everybody here knows is a terminal that works like old school first person shooter consoles where you press a button and it appears down from the top of your screen, press the hotkey again and it tucks back up and away. If I'm using a Mac a good alternative to guake is iTerm which has similar functionality.
• anotherevan 4y ago
  I've used KDE for decades before switching to Awesomewm, so still use Konsole (and Dolphin for that matter). In particular I like having the tabs row along the bottom, detection of URLs with the option to open, and the reasonably clean look stylistically. I'm open to changing, perhaps something that's a little faster at starting, but not found one that makes me go "a-ha" yet. Tilix looks like it has potential - may play with it a bit more. If I can get rid of the toolbar... Also, alternative file manager to Dolphin with a similar feature set...
• phibz 4y ago
  I discovered alacrity when I first learned rust and have stuck with it. It has good performance, despite possible exaggerations or regressions, good compatibility, a big enough scrollback, and real transparency. All my most important features YMMV
• mindcrime 4y ago
  Konsole. Why? Well.. I mean, I'm a KDE user anyway, and I've been using it for a long time. It "just works" and I've never felt any particular need to switch to anything else.
• nelgaard 4y ago
  termit. I just want unicode and tabs and a way to set background and foreground colors. I also like lxterminal and of course the emacs shell. I did try kitty after reading this, but is failed because of my openGL configuration. Silly.
• gtirloni 4y ago
  Tilix https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/
• joshu 4y ago
  wezterm
• sombragris 4y ago
  Konsole, and yakuake as its Quake-like version. It comes with the Plasma desktop and it has all features I need plus a million more. And it's reasonably fast.
  • kadoban 4y ago
    Quake-mode (being able to hide/show with a global hotkey) is a required feature for me, and yakuake is one of the few that support it. I have no idea how anyone gets any work done without being able to quickly get to a terminal. Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit. That gets me through the work day, when I'm stuck on Windows.
    • gwillz 4y ago
      The new windows terminal has quake mode? Now that's a game changer.
    • pxc 4y ago
      > Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit. Can you permanently resize it? Last I tried it, it was slow and I didn't see how to make it fullscreen or behave predictably on multimonitor setups, so I couldn't actually use it.
      • kadoban 4y ago
        Whatever settings I've done, there's one button to make it appear/disappear, and it's very quick. I don't do mine fullscreen though, I prefer just a corner. It stays whatever size I tell it to, I'd assume that can be most of the screen. Also I've turned on "focus mode", which gets rid of the huge titlebar. I use tmux inside of it so I don't need its tab bar or anything either.
  • rd07 4y ago
    Yakuake is my daily tool for development. I have tried other Quake-like terminal emulator like Guake on Gnome, but Yakuake is the best for me.
• BerislavLopac 4y ago
  I really grew fond of terminator.
• physicles 4y ago
  Terminator for a couple years now, because it has native support for split windows and is otherwise pretty good. tmux is great, but it essentially breaks multi-line text selection (you end up selecting bits of text from an adjacent pane), an update in any pane will cancel text selection in any other pane, and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work. Terminator solves those issues and also has great unicode/IME support -- I can type Chinese directly into the terminal.
  • pxc 4y ago
    > tmux is great, but it essentially breaks multi-line text selection (you end up selecting bits of text from an adjacent pane), an update in any pane will cancel text selection in any other pane, and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work. Typically you let tmux handle the text selection and clipboard management under these circumstances, which fixes all the text selection issues you mention. You can also enable scroll wheel support in tmux! Idr if it requires a plugin or something, but I have it in my config somewhere.
• weitzj 4y ago
  Now on i3: I used to have urxvt in daemon mode, so opening a new terminal will be faster and just launch a client. Then moved on to alacrity and finally it is kitty now. I just want to open my terminal fast on i3 and be able to display graphics in them (therefore kitty) Before i3 it was urxvt with tmux. I don’t have reasons to combine tmux with i3 (e.g. resuming a session). I3 is good enough
• Szpadel 4y ago
  I'm using tilix with tmux inside. tilix can be configured to not have any window manager decoration and have quake mode (drop-down terminal) it's my replacement for guake that wasnt working nice with Wayland. you can also put it in fullscreen and it'll stick to it in quake mode - the preferred way to use terminal for me
  • bestouff 4y ago
    Also it has multiple sub windows, separate colors for bold/italics/etc, and all of VTE's gimmicks.
• s_ting765 4y ago
  I recently started using kgx, aka console and it's a fresh breath of air tbh. Esp the purple color scheme change on the terminal tab whenever you are in a ssh shell. The red warning prompt after pasting a command with sudo in it is also a nice touch. Didn't know the terminal could be this interactive but am liking it. I liked blackbox and it was initially going to be my gnome-terminal replacement. If only the project was a bit more complete (has a high CPU usage bug).
• anonymzz 4y ago
  Alacritty,Because It's fast & minimal. If you want ligurature support & many features you can use kitty.
• abudabi123 4y ago
  Konsole is the default on KDE. Everything is near perfect except for an escape to classical Xterm three mouse button behavior for start to finish text sequence highlight. That right mouse button for context menu can be pushed off to Meta-Button-3. I never use the context menu but highlight text start to finish all the time. Very long web addresses with inserted prefix symbol sequence on line continuation Konsole could be smart enough to autoclean. A poleposition race among the terminal emulators to decide which is fastest and complete would be useful to check frequently.
• ranguna 4y ago
  Termite, it does one thing and does it well. I have no need to graphically accelerate a black window with white text, it's good on my battery.
• gsora 4y ago
  WezTerm! Minimal, fast, cross platform-first approach, easy to configure. I use it on macOS and Linux with essentially the same configuration file, no issue at all. And the maintainer is a cool human being, which is always a plus.
  • dizhn 4y ago
    Ditto on the developer. Though the software is excellent too.
• nortonham 4y ago
  xterm, mostly out of habit, and because it's everywhere. I'm on debian as well.
• ElectronBadger 4y ago
  I've been using urxvt on i3 for man years, just recently replaced it with kitty. Seems like it stays.
  • endorphine 4y ago
    What made you change? And what does kitty improved for you?
• AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  For me, it's Alacritty. It's fast, it's cross platform and it's driven via an alacritty.yml config file that's easy to move between machines. The vim like navigation of terminal output history is also handy for finding things.
• jstx1 4y ago
  Why do you people use terminal emulators?
  • em-bee 4y ago
    the main reason for me is that the command shell retains a history of commands that i used which allows me to efficiently repeat those commands. i can turn a series of commands into a script. also a lot of commands and file operations are faster in a terminal. there are also many commands that don't have a gui equivalent (and there are gui apps that don't have a commandline equivalent. the latter are the reason why we use terminal emulators as opposed to raw terminals(
    • jstx1 4y ago
      Oh I get all of these, maybe I have some confusion about the difference between a terminal and a terminal emulator. Take MacOS for example - there's the default Terminal app. It can do all the things you're describing out of the box and I agree that they're useful. (I would call this a terminal, not a terminal emulator <<< I guess that's the part where my terminology is wrong). Then there's the custom setups with kitty, tmux, other extensions etc. My question was what do people get out of the latter that isn't in the former.
      • em-bee 4y ago
        oh, ok. every terminal on a gui is a terminal emulator, because a real terminal is something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT420 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT420 (i used one of those at home in the 90s, directly connected to a modem (so i had to hand dial modem commands))
      • em-bee 4y ago
        basically you are asking what kind of advantages do these alternative terminal emulators have over the default. well, just look at what everyone here is writing about their choice. in part that depends on what the default is because on linux you get a variety of choices. there it often comes down to preference. the defaults change over time and some people prefer to stick with what they had. if it's not that then it's some kind of specific feature. it can be font choice (better default fonts, or an easier way to change the font), tab support or something else. it's not that one terminal is objectively better than another, but a few features that are important for one person but not for another. on macos i occasionally had issues with unicode support for foreign languages in the default terminal.app. so i switched to iTerm. iTerm also has tabs and tmux integration, which are nice extra features. btw tmux is a terminal multiplexer offering features that no terminal application has. the primary one is that it keeps running if i close a window and i can reconnect later. that is very useful for remote connections, but also locally it means i can log out without having to close all my terminal windows. keeping that state for me is very important to make it easier to switch between activities
• em-bee 4y ago
  i'd like a terminal that let's me create a multi-window layout and actually recreate that layout with exact positions and sizes every time i start it. recommendations?
  • mchaynes 4y ago
    tmux?
    • em-bee 4y ago
      i should have mentioned that i am running different tmux sessions in each of those terminals already. i am not looking for tmux integration to the terminal, as some of my tmux sessions are remote, so there is no real benefit. i could run a tmux session to lay out all my other tmux sessions, but then that would add another nesting layer, when my tmux sessions are already two levels deep. i also would like each terminal to be in a separate window.
  • ralgozino 4y ago
    Kitty has layouts, but for terminals inside kitty's window, not DE level windows. There are some presets and you can define your own.
    • em-bee 4y ago
      i tried that until i ran into a situation where i wanted one of the terminals to be next to a different app (so i could copy paste something) but i couldn't because the whole terminal app would obviously come to the top once i clicked into it. so i really prefer it to be separate windows
• gwillz 4y ago
  Yakuake. You're easily spoilt by a quake mode terminal and it's hard to go without it. Tab management and shortcuts are great. Full utf8 support. It's essentially the same as Konsole, all the internals are shared libraries. That all said, dunno how it would fly with a tiling window manager.
  • anotherevan 4y ago
    I use Yakuake with the Awesome tiling window manager and as long as you add it to the rule for floating clients in your rc.lua it works perfectly.
• TeddyDD 4y ago
  I use Alacritty because it's easy to configure and low maintenance. It's missing two features I'd love to have: ligatures and inline images. Ligatures are not important enoguh to switch and inline images won't work in tmux (tried it with wezterm and kitty) so I guess I'm stuck.
  • lain-dono 4y ago
    Alacritty has forks that supports ligatures. I use https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/alacritty-ligatures-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/alacritty-ligatures-git You can also take a look at https://github.com/fee1-dead/alacritty/tree/ligatures_harfbuzz https://github.com/fee1-dead/alacritty/tree/ligatures_harfbu...
• Findecanor 4y ago
  Mate Terminal, mostly because it supports multiple tabs that I can switch between using the same keyboard shortcuts as in other programs. Consistent, simple. I don't need more.
• yonrg 4y ago
  urxvtd + urxvtc I just got used to it over the years. I also have a number of extensions which I would miss. Also it is just very responsive and low on resources; same league as xterm. Also nowadays terminfo is mostly available on remote machines; I mainly work remote (I had an odroid as local system for quite a while). I would say, there is no reason to have a terminal which does tiling, there is tmux which brings many more features. Also, what the heck with gpu enabled terminals?
  • pxc 4y ago
    > Also, what the heck with gpu enabled terminals? On some operating systems, prior to GPU acceleration, all existing terminal emulators were so slow that they caused noticeable and frustrating lag under some circumstances, for example running tmux with text scrolling in multiple panes. Since then, we've seen the rise of cross-platform, performance-oriented terminal emulators (Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm) on the one hand and tmux adopt what amounts to frame dropping in the other (check out the fork called tmux-sixel if you prefer not to have this behavior or want sixel-based terminal graphics support). I do not understand why terminal emulator performance, especially on Windows and Mac, used to be so atrocious that only GPU-accelerated terminal emulators didn't suck there. Konsole, xterm, st, urxvt, and even GNOME Terminal have never needed to resort to that just to avoid massive flickering and lag.
• Smithalicious 4y ago
  I use xst, a fork of st. It does everything I need it to do. It's not very feature-full, but even if I had the kinds of features other terminal emulators have I wouldn't use them, so this is fine. https://github.com/gnotclub/xst https://github.com/gnotclub/xst
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• d0mine 4y ago
  vterm inside emacs. vterm is sufficiently standard terminal emulator. Emacs plays the role of a windows manager (manages multiple vterm windows (buffers in emacs terms)). Easy to save/restore window configurations.
• ahmedbodi 4y ago
  Surprised to see no mention of Hyper https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/
  • Asdrubalini 4y ago
    It's kinda slow and bloated for being a terminal emulator
• skinney6 4y ago
  I've been using Roxterm with AwesomeWM. I don't like borders, tabs or menus on my terminal. I just want it to pop up with a key combo (Meta Enter) and disappear with a Ctl-d. Bang bang. I bounced around for a bit and settled here. I can't recall all the details but Roxterm just seemed to be the one I could config to my liking on AwesomeWM. Arch moved it to the AUR a few years ago. I guess it's fallen out of favor for some reason.
• throwaway67743 4y ago
  Tilix, because it's relatively simple and doesn't get in my way with silly features (flame away konsole fanatics!)
• JdeBP 4y ago
  I prefer my own, that I wrote. But then I would. (-:
• yasinaydin 4y ago
  I used to use Guake for a long time, then when I was looking for an alternative with less dependencies, I found Tilda (https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda), which is very similar.