this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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I'm reconsidering my terminal emulator and was curious what everyone was using.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just use konsole , which is the default terminal emulator for KDE. I don't need anything fancy, just something basic to run commands, updates, a few scripts, etc.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

konsole is low-key a great terminal. It's really snappy, supports ligatures, and looks good. It's one of my favorite KDE applications and the one I miss most when it's not available.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Same. I do have gnome on my laptop and the terminal was lacking relative to my KDE desktop, so I ended up making the switch there too

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

cool-retro-term 😎 to live in retro cyberpunk dreamland

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Wow that is actually way cooler than the original terminals. Thx!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I primarily use Alacritty. I spend quite a lot of time running things that produce ludicrous amounts of output (eg. compiling Android from source). Out of 10 or so terminal emulators I've tested earlier this year, it was the only one that didn't use 100% CPU displaying all that output, staying in the low single digits.

I'd prefer to use Wezterm because I like its lua configuration system and the builtin pane splitting, but with my workload, I still run into issues where its CPU usage shoots to 100% and becomes non-responsive for a while. (That said, it's already a lot better than before. I try to report any issues I can reliably reproduce and Wez has been wonderful about fixing them.)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It really does not make sense a terminal consuming 100% CPU, so Alacrittycis my choice as well

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use foot together with foot-server. The client opens in less than a millisecond, and I usually have tens of terminal windows open at the same time. Tabbing comes from the window manager.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (17 children)

When I'm using a tiling window manager, I use kitty, because I like its speed and support for font ligatures. When I'm using a Desktop Environment like Gnome or KDE I usually don't use the terminal at all, but if I need it, I use the default emulator.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gnome terminal. I don't really care the terminal emulator. What's in the terminal is what's important. The terminal window just needs to be able to resize correctly though.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use Kitty, because it works well on both X and Wayland, and is GPU accelerated. For some reason, Alacritty doesn't display the fonts properly (Displays them much smaller on Wayland. Only program I have such issues with)

Also Kitty is more widely packaged (for example on Debian based distros)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I like my kitty

kitty terminal emulator displaying results of neofetch command

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use wezterm, but there are many good ones

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Anything, but with tmux running inside. You can copy text even in a tty, split the terminal window, detach from and attach to tmux sessions, etc. I will never use a terminal for any moderately complex task without tmux again :)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Personally I've been using gnome-terminal for quite a while and was fairly happy except that I needed to maintain gnome-terminal and libvte patches to get notification support. Having some sort of notification when a long-running command completes is very important to my productivity.

I've been using Konsole but not fully happy.

  • No hyperlink support.
  • Selection is lost when my prompt updates (I have the time so that I know when I have started commands).

I've been looking at other options but none-of them feel quite right.

Alacritty:

  • No unlimited scrollback.

Kitty:

  • Selection bug with updating prompt.
  • No unlimited scrollback.

Wezterm:

  • No unlimited scrollback.

Terminator:

  • Has this terminal group bar that I can't get rid of.
  • No notification support.

I realize that I am probably going to have to make a compromise (probably just go back to gnome-terminal with patches) but I figured it would be interesting to see what everyone else was using and make sure I didn't miss something.

To me the important features are:

  1. Unlimited scrollback.
  2. Notification support (ideally with the 777 Notify command, but if the terminal bell can make a notification that is fine).
  3. Clean UI. (I don't use tabs so need to be able to hide the tab bar)
  4. Hyperlink support.
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure you can set alacritty and kitty to a ridiculously high number of scrollback lines, like at least several trillion. I think I just add 4 zeros on to the default and I've never had enough output for it to run out of scrollback. At some point you're going to run out of ram or storage for storing scrollback so you can't realistically have unlimited scrollback without doing something ridiculous.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

urxvt. It works good enough and doesn't use much memory.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is what i use as well.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I almost exclusively use Yakuake nowadays. I like the drop down terminal.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

foot is great. Simple, fast, and customisable enough for my needs.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yakuake, I can't use anything other than a quake based terminal. Because of my work I need 24/7 quick access to a terminal, yakuake is just that

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Alacritty is great, but I switched to wezterm due to ligatures support

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm using foot since I've installed sway and it's just fine ..not a super user to evaluate well

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Alacritty for me

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Kitty has awesome framerates, easily hitting 90fps pushing 150k - 180k per frame. Alacrity is also dope.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

st is good enough for my needs. I use tmux for multiplexing, scrollback, and tabs

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TMUX is life. Before, I was fighting screen to do what I needed. TMUX just does it and the customisation puts it way above. I can't imagine working on the command line without TMUX.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Terminator is the one I've been using for a while

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as "A high-end terminal for low-end systems".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Anything that supports solarized dark and solarized light theming. It is so much less eyestrain

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Kitty with catppuccin and 50%-ish transparency. Works like a charm. And also if you add something like what kitti3 does (look it up on github), will be even better.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I recommend black box. https://flathub.org/apps/com.raggesilver.BlackBox it is the nicest and most intergrated terminal on gnome and I use it daily and have zero issues

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yakuake. I've been using it for more than a decade and love it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

St with few patches and personal customizations is amazing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I rather enjoy Tilix. It can tile a single tab without tmux and it can also give special handling to links matched from regexps. I use it to go from Python stacktraces to correct line in Emacs with just a click. It can also do Quake-like terminal, which I use alot.

The project is looking for maintainers, though, so it's possible at some point I need to start looking for alternatives..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whatever gets me connected to my tmux session over ssh

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

While y'all here:

is there a terminal emulator that has "modern" text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z...

Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character..

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

“modern” text entry controls... Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del ...

Those are not really features of the terminal emulator but of the shell. I don't think a terminal emulator can coerce bash or zsh or whatever to do those things unless it acts as some kind of proxy between your text editing buffer and the shell, which would probably lead to its own set of complications. The thing you want would have to be a combination of a GUI terminal program and its own shell.

For bash, I suggest you read up on readline keyboard shortcuts, which can do many of the text editing tricks that you are asking. The shortcuts are different than what you are used to on Windows, and there's no concept of "selecting" text, but for terminal applications it's pretty much the standard way text input is handled on Linux.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I know that zsh has the option to use vim-like keybindings if you're familiar with those.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

xfce4-terminal has transparency and warns when I'm about to paste multiple lines to it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I love wezterm, primarily because it is cross platform. The most important factor to me is being able to use the same one on Windows, Mac and Linux, because I use all three on a regular basis and don't want to maintain multiple configs. However, wezterm currently has a bug that prevents it from opening on Wayland+Nvidia which forces me to use something else on Linux. None of the other ones get close imo.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Wezterm, which does everything, with a great developer behind it.

Second choice is Konsole: super solid and great rendering.

Aaand tmux with either of those.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

alacritty. the only downside for me is no ligatures

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I really love Tabby

Tabs, CMD, SSH, Powershell... all included. It has multiple profiles, can be used portable, has themes and Integrations, like one for Docker

Never need anything else imo 😊

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