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?
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I've been using Alacritty for a while. It's fast and does everything I need.
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.
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.
kitty
+1
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
😻
Wezterm for me, I like the multiplexer that comes with it.
It works cross platform on every machine including windows with a single lua config and the documentation feels complete.
foot
I only changed the colors and the font to Fira Code.
I'm happy with Konsole. Don't think I've customized it any. TEs by and large just get the job done.
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.
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
Yeah, foot is really fast even without server mode.
Seconded, easy to use, easy to configure and does what it's supposed to do.
Care to elaborate what alacritty does differently than foot?
It's written in C and is a bit more minimalist. Builds faster than alacritty, and is pretty even with alacritty in perf.
Alacritty is written in rust. 😎
stif Xorg,footif Wayland.if you switch often, you might like kitty (it works for both)
I like urxvt with i3
Urxvt seemed to be the fastest of them all. Definitely my favourite.
Yeah! That's why I like it. Lots of specific configuration, and it has a plugin system with some good plugins, too!
Any plugins you may recommend?
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!
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...
I've tried tons over the years and I always keep going back to yakuake.
I use kitty. I don't use its multiplexer features, but I do use its emoji picker a lot.
I don't do much customizing at the terminal. Currently I use
alacritty,terminator, andst. Every few years I go through a searching-for-the-perfect-terminal and get frustrated at various shortcomings.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.
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.
Yakuake. <3 drop down terminals.
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.
I have it bound to capslock. What else am I going to use that key for?
Damn. That's actually a good idea! +1
Hell yea
I haven't needed anything different than Konsole, it works great for me.
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.
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
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.
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.
Blackbox
https://gitlab.gnome.org/raggesilver/blackbox
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
Tried it and was not much pleased. What makes it better in your opinion?
I have tried them all and this is my preferred option.
Made for gnome = bloatware, change my mind.
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.
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.
I like terminator
I just can't drop
st.Serial port hooked up to my oscilloscope
Gnome terminal. I'm just used to it.
KDE's Konsole, I love using it since it also integrates into Dolphin
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
I use Alacritty and have only themed its colors
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.
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.
honestly I just use what come with the DE but if I'm not using a DE then I'll install kitty
Alacritty + tmux OR urxvt
Been using foot for like 4 years.
Ayyeee, it's great to see another Tilda user!
I use WezTerm. It comes with great defaults imo.
I was using kitty and then switched to WezTerm because of the multiplexing. It's nice.
When I am on Hyprland I use
foot. It is fast and well configurable.My fallback is Gnome and inside I use the new
kgxaka Console. I like that it shows in the window decoration's color when I'm working remotely or as super user.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. :)
Blackbox has the coloring feature, too.
Boring answer, but I just use
gnome-terminalwith 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.Gnome Console since it is consistent with the rest of Gnome and works well enough.
I am on
stas 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.Mlterm because it's the only low latency terminal with modern features.
My favorite is Tilda, (drop down terminal) and my second favorite would be good ol' Konsole.
Konsole
I'm another Alacritty user. It's been my daily driver for years at this point and I have no complaints
I always liked Terminator because of the easy splitscreening.
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.
alacritty! only problem is no ligatures 😭
What are ligatures?
when individual characters join together. it is defined in the font. such as
fiorffin writing, or=>forming an arrow, or>=looking like the mathematical form. often using when coding, to make multi-character operators look nicer.Some languages have characters which are really two letters mushed together, like:
A feature in my book! 😄
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)
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.
I've just started using Black Box and I really like it.
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:
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.
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
Used to use Terminator on Cinnamon, but now I use Konsole with bindings to split horizontally and vertically on Plasma.
st all the way. Quick to launch and it works well
Whatever comes with the DE. I don't use it enough to have a favorite.
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.
Don't matter much as long as I got tmux
Unless there's a Linux tty that supports -CC, like iterm2 for macOS.
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.
I use both WezTerm and Kitty, they are both great with customization. You can see my config in dotfiles here https://github.com/haunt98/dotfiles
Kitty is great
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.
💀 Microsoft™ Terminal