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Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?
I use putty and have played with secureCRT. What are the other terminals people in HN use on a daily basis.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jsares 17y agoI've used both on Windows before and also use Cygwin.
- pwmanagerdied 17y agoCould someone explain the interest/value of this post to me? I'm not familiar with anything that would significantly distinguish them.
- pyre 17y ago* Unicode support * Transparency/Pseudo-transparency support * Interactions with other systems and their termcap/terminfo files. * Interaction with GNU screen (iirc, the 'auto-detect' feature of XFCE4-Terminal for which backspace sequence to send fails for me currently when using screen. I have to force it to use ^H as backspace) * Support for more than just Type-1 fonts. * How does the scrollback buffer work? gnome-terminal SUCKS when a wall of text hits the screen, while rxvt-unicode blows through it like nothing. ... There are many other things that could be brought up in relation to these (terminal emulators). For instance, rxvt-unicode has a powerful Perl API, and there are many modules that do things like (for instance) implement simple tabs for a rxvt-unicode window.
- pwmanagerdied 17y agoJesus, I'd been using gnome-terminal sine I switched over to Linux full-time a few months ago. I assumed that the reason it was sluggish was because I'm running it on an old machine. I just installed rxvt-unicode after re-reading your post, and even after enabling a background image for no good reason it blows gnome-terminal away. Thanks a lot, this is something worth knowing.
- Sapient 17y agoI managed to get quite a few excellent tips out of this discussion. I found a far less buggy terminal, and discovered a feature of Windows I didnt know existed. Seems like a good deal to me...
- mhansen 17y agoPutty, with a cygwin patch. Works fine, only gripe with it is I can't press Windows+Left and have it take up the left half of the screen. It just refuses to resize. The windows terminal is just horrible. I tried Console2 but it was buggy as hell, froze all the time, and the transparency made it lag.
- smhinsey 17y agoWow, I had no idea about the Win-Arrow window resizing thing. Thanks for mentioning it.
- makecheck 17y agoOn the Mac, I use MacTelnet, even as a local terminal. It has an almost ridiculous number of features (compared to Terminal.app or iTerm, anyway), and is very configurable. The main problems are that it is mainly vt100/partial-xterm, and is a beta. On Linux or Solaris, I use "aterm". It works as well as xterm or rxvt. But it has a lot of nice interface tweaks, such as NeXT-style scrollbars, pseudo-transparency, more intelligent text selection (IMHO), and a way to change colors when inactive. On Windows, I don't run much locally (since not a lot of useful command-line tools come with Windows). So my terminal work tends to be over SSH to a machine that has real tools. :) I use PuTTY for SSH, and it works very well. My main issue is that it seems unnecessarily hard to do certain things, e.g. copy/paste.
- apotheon 17y agoI used to use aterm, but one thing drove me to change -- Unicode support. Now, I use rxvt-unicode. Since making the move, though, I've grown to love rxvt-unicode's daemon mode and discovered that pseudo-transparency works better than it did on aterm. I mention my reasons for choosing rxvt-unicode over other terminal emulators here: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=451 http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=451
- jcromartie 17y agoTerminal.app as of OS X 10.5 is my favorite terminal. I like to use rxvt under Cygwin.
- erlanger 17y agoI'm using 2.1 on 10.6...I think it's about the same as 2.0.
- ptomato 17y agoYou can split windows, but otherwise pretty much the same, yes.
- whalesalad 17y agoI definitely feel performance increases all over the place in 10.6. Particularly in Terminal.app... it's super snappy! Directory listings are instantaneous whereas before there seemed to be a slight little lag. Note: I am using zsh with my term declared as xterm.
- GeneralMaximus 17y agoTry out iTerm sometime. Much, much faster and lighter than Terminal.app. I switched to iTerm when Terminal.app crashed while compiling Haiku ... twice. The problem, I believe, was the large amount of compiler output.
- randallsquared 17y agoI used iTerm before Leopard, but it crashed at least once a week, and sometimes it would just forget settings, and it used up an insane amount of resources if you left it open for a few days (and shutting down all my ssh sessions and restarting them is not my idea of a good time, nor is trying to figure out where I put this server or that server in the tab list; I like them to stay at the same position so I don't have to consciously think about that). When Leopard came out, it had a Terminal.app that fixed essentially all my issues with the previous Terminal.app, including having tabs, etc, and it hardly uses any resources at all, and stays open without crashing for weeks at a time (in fact, I don't think I've ever managed to crash it). Now that there's a copy-on-select plugin for SIMBL for Terminal.app, it's just about perfect.
- graywh 17y agoXterm.
- kbob 17y agoXterm. It's been there for me since 1988, and I'm certain it'll be there right up until the eschaton in 2038. It's installed on every X11 system and it's always compatible. (It has antialiased fonts, too.)
- DanHulton 17y agoYakuake. Man, I <3 that so much. Being able to Meta+~ and just have a terminal window right freaking there? Heaven. Plus, I set up a few hotkeys SHIFT+LEFT/RIGHT to move between sessions. SHIFT+DOWN/UP for create/close session. Makes it very easy to do things.
- ptomato 17y agoYou can also do this with Terminal.app on OS X with this: http://visor.binaryage.com/ http://visor.binaryage.com/
- shadytrees 17y agorxvt-unicode with its Perl API [1] and rather amazing list of Perl extensions [2] on Linux OSes, puttycyg on Cygwin. (I recommend puttycyg if you've been using rxvt on Cygwin. Being able to type Unicode characters is an amazingly exhilarating experience, especially if you're lonely.) [1]: http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/src/urxvt.pm http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/src/urx... [2]: http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html
- duskwuff 17y agorxvt-unicode also has some of the best (most accurate, most complete) terminal emulation out there, second only to xterm. Daemon mode is also a neat trick if you're running on a limited-memory system.
- apotheon 17y agoI love the daemon (aka "client/server") operation of rxvt-unicode, and the fact that with all its capabilities it's still smaller than xterm.
- cadillac 17y agoI've used the mode and I really liked it, except when it starts to behave buggy needing to kill the server loosing all the windows. I prefer to name it psycho mode.
- jaspervdj 17y agoI second rxvt-unicode. Very configurable, and works fine with a tiling window manager.
- apotheon 17y agoI don't have that problem. Perhaps there's something glitchy about the way rxvt-unicode works with your setup in particular -- which might be an rxvt-unicode problem, but not a problem that affects me, evidently.
- slig 17y agoiTerm, on tiger.
- sielskr 17y agoGnome Terminal because of its text smoothing (and because it adheres to a set of human interface guidelines).
- antileet 17y agoI used to use Gnome-terminal for the same reason, but it doesn't behave great with screen sometimes, and has some other small issues. I'd recommend mrxvt, a superset of rxvt. It's lighter, has support for tabs, fonts, transparency, etc. http://code.google.com/p/mrxvt/wiki/Main http://code.google.com/p/mrxvt/wiki/Main
- glymor 17y agoAre you talking about the backspace issue? There are some old patches from ubuntu that show how to fix it (though they they don't seem to use them themselves anymore): https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/vte/+bug/29787/comments/32 https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/vte/+bug/29787/com... rxvt and friends gave me problems using truetype fonts. They have their own code for calculating widths which gives the wrong answer even when it's monospaced. I wish there were more terminals. It may seem like there's a lot but they are derived from a fairly small number of roots and they inherit all of the bizarre behaviour.
- glymor 17y agoFor those that don't run gnome you can run vte directly, just download the source and compile the demo app.
- mickt 17y agoGuake, which provides a Quake like terminal and quick and easy access to a terminal using the F12 key. Plus, it supports anti-aliased fonts and multiple tabs. http://trac.guake-terminal.org/ http://trac.guake-terminal.org/ On my Mac at work I use Visor. http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor
- warp 17y agoI prefer Terminal.app, mostly because it uses the OS native keys for copy/paste (cmd-c, cmd-v). On windows I use putty which has keyboard paste on Shift-Insert. On linux I use gnome-terminal which has keyboard copy/paste on Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V. (I should stop using all three of these operating systems... :)
- bdwalter 17y agoxterm
- tdziuba 17y agoTerminator. Fuck yeah.
- barrkel 17y agoRxvt, normally on Cygwin. If I had more use for Unicode in practice, I'd use urxvt on non-Cygwin. Also, when ssh into remote boxes, I often use screen, which effectively ends up being a pretty crappy terminal - major failure mode is loss of scrollback buffer, Ctrl-A ESC notwithstanding.
- pyre 17y ago> Ctrl-A ESC notwithstanding. Huh? The loss of the scrollback buffer sucks... except for that other scrollback buffer?
- barrkel 17y agoMouse wheel / Shift+PgUp is infinitely more usable for scrollback access than Ctrl-A ESC. Ctrl-A ESC is sufficiently hard to access that it might as well not be a feature - rather than scroll up to see a command's output, I re-run it piped to less.
- pyre 17y agoTry Ctrl-A + [ which puts you into 'copy mode' and ] to exit 'copy mode'. While in copy mode you can use arrow keys and/or page up/down to go through screen's scrollback buffer. I usually run anything that will have a wall of text piped to less anyways (with or without screen).
- blasdel 17y agoOn Windows I use MinTTY -- it is basically perfect on that platform. It's bizarre how ridiculously terrible every other windows tty is: simple shit like text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts, etc. is universally missing. I only discovered it due to my boss' "install everything" cygwin policy, as it's in their repo and its installer puts a link on your desktop. PuTTY is bad enough as an SSH client, much less its crap terminal emulation. Whoever at Microsoft that keeps making the decision to ship cmd.exe again needs to be hanged in public square.
- mhansen 17y agoWonderful! Thanks for mentioning MinTTY, this handles the Win+Left resizing perfectly.
- gaius 17y agoCME.EXE is about backwards compatibility. New work should be done in PowerShell' which is quite clever (think Unix pipes with COM objects instead of plain text).
- yangyang 17y agoThat's a shell, not a terminal emulator.
- nailer 17y agoYou can use Powershell as a tabbed terminal too.
- yangyang 17y agoYou're confusing shells and terminal emulators (if you can call them that under windows). You can use the "Powershell ISE" thing as a tabbed "terminal", but Powershell itself will quite happily run under the windows console "terminal emulator".
- 17y ago
- bwhite 17y agoEmulator? Oh, you must be using one of those newfangled windowing subsystems. Hm. It's a fad I tell you, just a passing fad. (Actual answer: aterm for the transparency feature.)
- apu 17y agokonsole. It's so much better than the gnome-terminal (monitor for silence/activity rules!). Actually, in recent years, it seems like gnome has gotten harder and harder to use for an expert in all aspects...I occasionally have to work on a gnome machine and it's pure hell trying to figure out how to get simple stuff to work. Of course, perhaps this is their goal in any case: target n00bs and grandmas to increase marketshare. If so, I'm perfectly fine with that =)
- guicifuentes 17y agoIn Konsole you can split the window a là Emacs or Vim buffers, which is pretty handy always. The special keys works, not like F1 in gnome-terminal which opens the help. How many times do you switch between terminals because you need to copy something or whatever? That's over with Konsole
- nsm 17y agokonsole is great for long term work, and yakuake is better for some one time command!
- xenoterracide 17y agofor a 1 time command that I don't need to look at again I'd just use alt+f2 kde's 'run prompt' is pretty good. of course it doesn't actually provide the 'shell environment'.
- sykora 17y agoI used to use konsole, because it was default with KDE. After some time I made a conscious effort and switched to rxvt-unicode, or urxvt. It's a great terminal emulator, once you've got it configured, but that process can be tough. The documentation for the really cool stuff has also been a tad incomplete for me.
- Xichekolas 17y agoI use http://www.xfce.org/projects/terminal/ http://www.xfce.org/projects/terminal/ because it's simple and it works.
- fix3r 17y agoxterm bundled with Leopard. It supports 256 colors and is very fast. Terminal.app only for quick sessions. If only X11 fullscreen feature worked properly... (should probably try the latest build of XQuartz)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- yangyang 17y agoWhat's next then? What OS do you use? What Linux dist? What web browser?!
- nailer 17y agoPoderosa. Tabbed terminal for Windows. Has some bugs, but much more reliable than PuttyCM (the tabbed Putty wrapper).
- christefano 17y agoiTerm for OS X is fantastic. I like the custom keyboard profiles, full screen mode and appearance niceties (like tab styles and being able to hide the scrollbar). An especially great feature is the multiple tab input mode. Not too long ago I ssh'd into 3 new servers for three separate clients and did essentially the same setup and security updates for about an hour. At the end, I was able to bill for 3 hours. http://iterm.sourceforge.net/ I also use Visor, a handy utility written by Nicholas Jitkoff (the creator of Quicksilver). It extends Apple's Terminal by giving it a heads-up display, making a terminal available in any program by simply hitting a keystroke. It doesn't work with Snow Leopard, though, and when I first upgraded I actually felt like one of my limbs was always asleep. Fortunately, there's a way to make it work: http://metaskills.net/2009/8/18/visor-terminal-on-snow-leopard For one-off commands where I don't need to see any output (like killing or renicing processes), I use Quicksilver in command mode and use the "run command in shell" action. The latest version of Quicksilver works with Snow Leopard with very minor problems: http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list
- yu 17y agoPutty mostly. Dated? though TeraTerm has/had good out of the box DEC, HP, IBM terminal emulation; customer engagements.
- ertug 17y agorxvt-unicode along with urxvt daemon (or urxvtd). No smoothing or transparency. A good companion to xmonad.
- iterationx 17y agoeterm is kinda fun http://www.enlightenment.org/ http://www.enlightenment.org/
- poltergeist 17y ago1. Tilda. * Buggy when you have transparency enabled and resize ( or minimize and then maximize ) the terminal. Otherwise, looks and feels great. 2. Yakuake. * No bugs that I have discovered, and looks great. Is meant for KDE, but works awesomely on GNOME as well. The only nuisance is the title bar ( which can, at present have a minimum height of 1 pixel ), and we can't make it disappear completely.