Spyke
linux·Linuxbystark

Favorite Terminal Emulator

I have recently jumped head first into the Linux space. I've installed Arch on my daily driver and I've become overwhelmed/overjoyed with my options. I'd like to hear from the community about your Linux favorites.

What is your favorite Terminal Emulator and what have you done to customize it?

View original on qlemmy.com

Also using this one for years now, don't see a reason to change, although I see some "foot" in conjunction with wayland quite often.

3

Alacritty is also the terminal that feels small and focused enough for me. Too many other terminals try to do everything like session management, etc.

2

I like how the +1 of OG Reddit made it to Lemmy, but without the downvote hate of current Reddit. I've always seen those comments as more than just an upvote. An upvote can be a "+1", but also a "thank you for your contribution". A +1 is only a +1.

Also +1 for kitty

9

It works cross platform on every machine including windows with a single lua config and the documentation feels complete.

5
feddit.de

foot

I only changed the colors and the font to Fira Code.

20
lemmy.ml

I'm happy with Konsole. Don't think I've customized it any. TEs by and large just get the job done.

17

I looked quite a bit. Konsole is king for me.

My only complaint is the SSH profiles don't always work as intended, but that's just a theming thing.

8
infosec.pub

Switched from alacritty after using it for a year or two to foot. Does what it's supposed to well, and not a bunch of other shit

17

Yeah, foot is really fast even without server mode.

4

Seconded, easy to use, easy to configure and does what it's supposed to do.

3
dinoreply
discuss.tchncs.de

Care to elaborate what alacritty does differently than foot?

1
offby1reply
infosec.pub

It's written in C and is a bit more minimalist. Builds faster than alacritty, and is pretty even with alacritty in perf.

1
smoofreply
kbin.social

Urxvt seemed to be the fastest of them all. Definitely my favourite.

6
Syntheadreply
lemmy.world

Yeah! That's why I like it. Lots of specific configuration, and it has a plugin system with some good plugins, too!

3

Yes it is the fastest, I test it from time to time and it is always on top. Use bitmap fonts for more speed.

urxvt ftw!

1

I use Yakuake and Konsole since they came along with KDE Plasma. I've never really thought about using anything else, but maybe I should...

12

I use kitty. I don't use its multiplexer features, but I do use its emoji picker a lot.

10

I don't do much customizing at the terminal. Currently I use alacritty, terminator, and st. Every few years I go through a searching-for-the-perfect-terminal and get frustrated at various shortcomings.

10

Used to be termite for its minimalist feature. Now that it's gone I move on to Wezterm. Occasionally I use alacrity to connect to armbian nodes because it can't recognize wezterm. I hate kitty, not because of the terminal itself, but the dev. There is a snarky comment at github issue made by kitty's dev when people request for a termite-like feature. It drove me to uninstall kitty straight away.

9

I'm using Tilix right now, mostly because it's the best of the very few that support touch scrolling. Since I'm using my Surface Pro as a tablet a lot of the time that's an important feature to me.

9
JSens1998reply
lemmy.ml

I also love me some drop down terminals!

I personally use Tilda... because it allows me to drop it down using just the ` key, and the background transparency actually works (unlike Yakuake) on my distro.

2
lemmy.ml

I use kitty and alacritty most important thing is editting the dot profiles in bash or zsh to get color codes for things and autocorrection.

8
lemmy.fmhy.net

How do you get modern kitty on ubuntu based distros? I'm on pop os and there are no ppas or packages within the last few years

2

Lunar Lobster has 0.26.5, which is from November. Coulda gone with something a little fresher, but it isn't that severely out of date.

1

Gnome Terminal when I'm in GNOME, Konsole when I'm in KDE, and plain old xterm for i3 and any other WM. These just feel like they fit just right into their respective DE/WM.

8

I love it for its simplicity but unfortunately some fonts like Fira Code are weirdly buggy on font size 11. Still a very pretty and just werks™ terminal for basic usage so I kept using it with a changed font lol

2

Tried it and was not much pleased. What makes it better in your opinion?

1

If you don't like it, don't use it. I like it so I use it. I don't have to validate my choices with things that don't matter.

7

I don't agree at all that gnome applications are bloat ware. Most of the gnome applications are very minimal and light weight.

Also I guess it is great we have options.

1

This, I don't use KDE for like a decade now, but Konsole and Yakuake are a must. And the Z-Modem integration is just 👌 on top of the overall usability

1

I'm using Alacritty. It's fast, it includes a Vi mode within its viewport/scrollback and it is highly customizable if you want to. But I haven't customized it much to be honest, since I mostly go straight into tmux, vim or ranger.

6

Urxvt, slight colorscheme changes to make background dark gray and foreground - light gray. alacritty might be "blazingly fast" but in my experience if terminal is slowing you down - you are doing something wrong. On the other hand urxvt uses 20 times less memory.

6

honestly I just use what come with the DE but if I'm not using a DE then I'll install kitty

5

I was using kitty and then switched to WezTerm because of the multiplexing. It's nice.

3
Tom
lemmy.world

When I am on Hyprland I use foot. It is fast and well configurable.

My fallback is Gnome and inside I use the new kgx aka Console. I like that it shows in the window decoration's color when I'm working remotely or as super user.

4

I'm pretty happy with "Console" myself. It works exactly like I expect it to, and it's new look is pretty clean. I thought "Terminal" was fine too. I use dozens of terminals a day when working, but I suppose I'm not enough of a power user to care to configure them. :)

2

Boring answer, but I just use gnome-terminal with a nord theme. I also remove the menu and scroll bars, and add some internal padding.

The only other thing I do, is I use tdrop so I can have a "scratchpad" or dropdown terminal that I can toggle with gnome-terminal.

4

Gnome Console since it is consistent with the rest of Gnome and works well enough.

4

I am on st as well. The externalpipe patch is the killer feature for me, it's so much more flexible than the usual URL open that's built into many other terminal emulators. xterm and urxvt had something similar too. Alacritty has an open issue for the feature.

3

Mlterm because it's the only low latency terminal with modern features.

3

My favorite is Tilda, (drop down terminal) and my second favorite would be good ol' Konsole.

3

I'm another Alacritty user. It's been my daily driver for years at this point and I have no complaints

3

st from suckless all the way. Used it a couple of years now in conjunction with i3. I'm spawning a lot of terminals, doing a few commands and closing them often, so starting quick is a must.

Wrote a small patch that allows me to copy current directory from a terminal instance to primary selection with a keybinding. That allows me to quickly navigate to whatever directory that would be in another terminal or application.

3

when individual characters join together. it is defined in the font. such as fi or ff in writing, or => forming an arrow, or >= looking like the mathematical form. often using when coding, to make multi-character operators look nicer.

2

ligatures are when you join two or more glyphs into a single one. For instance, instead of having the two characters = and > to form => if you had ligature support you would see ⇒. Some terminals have support to recognize sequences like => (and others obviously) and turn them into their corresponding ligatures (only for display though, the actual file contents remain umchanged)

1

Do any terminal emulators on Linux implement the tmux control protocol, i.e. tmux -cc?

I use this with iTerm2 on macOS to turn tmux windows into native tabs, and to integrate with the native scroll back buffer.

I really miss this feature on Linux.

3

I've used xterm, rxvt, kitty, and now alacritty. I like alacritty because it's fast and simple. The only thing I don't like is that the default color scheme is off. If you run tmux in something like xterm, the bar is green. But in the default alacritty, it looks more yellow.

So I have this in my ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml:

# XTerm's default colors
colors:
   # Default colors
   primary:
     background: '#000000'
     foreground: '#d8d8d8'
   # Normal colors
   normal:
     black:   '#000000'
     red:     '#cd0000'
     green:   '#00cd00'
     yellow:  '#cdcd00'
     blue:    '#0000ee'
     magenta: '#cd00cd'
     cyan:    '#00cdcd'
     white:   '#e5e5e5'

   # Bright colors
   bright:
     black:   '#7f7f7f'
     red:     '#ff0000'
     green:   '#00ff00'
     yellow:  '#ffff00'
     blue:    '#5c5cff'
     magenta: '#ff00ff'
     cyan:    '#00ffff'
     white:   '#ffffff'
2

Started using Kona Ike dice it’s what came by default with KDE. Tried kitty, alacritty, foot (I think that was the name, on Wayland) and iterm2 on Mac… and came back to konsole in KDE and terminal.app in Mac.

Truth is I just need a simple terminal. Kitty and Alacritty and other terminals continuously had me in that’s-not-the-right-way, configuring terminal colors through ssh, or tmux compatability (kitty even says that you shouldn’t use tmux, and screen splitting should be done at the terminal, not in the server).

At the end of the day, I use whatever is installed where I work. So far, all “default” terminals seem to be enough.

2

Konsole and gnome shell, super lame but I haven't had any trouble with them. Ftlog mintty on windows since it comes with git. I have a terrible time with the windows console

2

Used to use Terminator on Cinnamon, but now I use Konsole with bindings to split horizontally and vertically on Plasma.

2

Whatever comes with the DE. I don't use it enough to have a favorite.

2

Depends what I'm doing, where and how. I do use tmux everywhere though but at home xfce-terminal, At work I tend to use terminator for the wonders of group control but if connecting from a windows pc i'll be on windows-terminal.

For shell I try to use zsh everywhere with p10k and omz.

2

Don't matter much as long as I got tmux

Unless there's a Linux tty that supports -CC, like iterm2 for macOS.

2

Guake and only really customized by setting infinite scroll and tweaked transparency. I jump in and out of the terminal all the time, so it's perfect for me. Plus F12 for terminal is old muscle memory from RISCOS.

1
lemmy.ml

Microsoft terminal. It has profiles for each connection and Ligature support for fonts. Font rendering is good. Theming is nice.

Edit: in the linux world i like konsole and xfce terminal.

-3