Which terminal emulator do you use?
I've always just used konsole or gnome terminal. Never really looked into what else is available. Tried cool-retro-term the other day, but the novelty wore off pretty fast for me.
Curious to see if there's a terminal someone swears by and refuses to use anything else.
kitty. it's the first thing I install on a new machine.
And why do you usw kitty? For me its the hyprland default terminal emulator and I never had problems with it so I stuck with it
I tested kitty and alacrity when I first found out about advanced term emulators. I liked kitty more, but I don't remember why. I use the kittens all the time. It's super convenient to play a video or display an image in the terminal. Kitty works on most distros. I wish it worked on windows, too, so I could use it at work.
Ditto on that.
alacritty
Seconded, Alacritty has been great to me
Konsole
I used (u)xterm for like 20 years before discovering that Konsole is solid and beautiful. My whole tiling setup is backed up with KDE apps now.
My Distro came with kde so I got used to Konsole plus for sone reason other terminal emulators felt slower
I used to install VS code for every new install and now I just stick to Kate. Although the storage impact is minimal, a lot of the dependencies for KDE apps are already present if you are running KDE as your desktop env.
Same here, but with Fish 🐠
I love the features of fish but the colors are hard to read on my terminal screen when there is blue text sometimes. Wish I could change the default colors of fiah
I don't know the difference between a terminal and a terminal emulator, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.
Lately using Foot since that's what my distro shipped with.
A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I've never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.
These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn't make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.
Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.
Realistically, no difference.
They are called emulators because "Terminal" used to mean a full-screen text interface to a mainframe. The functionality has carried on, which is why terminals behave pretty much the same on any platform. You don't use your system's regular text fields in a terminal emulator, for example.
A terminal is a physical device like a VT100. When people refer to a terminal today it's almost always a terminal emulator running on a TTY, ssh on a PTY, a login shell or a GUI program.
What distro ships my favorite term foot?
Fedora Sericea (Silverblue variant with sway)
Garuda
What's your DE?
Hyprland
A terminal is the thing that looks like it might be a computer, but nobody is home, it's just connected to a modem. Or, maybe, if you're lucky, The Computer of your university.
A terminal emulator is, well, an emulator, so you can use a 1970's shell, right there on your computer, just like you can emulate and play Pong or Space Invaders...
Hope that helps
Foot!
... and tmux session open in it.
Foot
I was considering Foot, it is fast (renderwise and in interactive use) and the dev seems like an awesome person. But it doesn't support ligatures. I'll watch the issue and give it a shot when it's implemented.
Wezterm. I love some of it's features (quick search).
I also love wezterm, but because I was able to easily disable all of it's keyboard shortcuts and only re-enable those few I want (ctrl+shift+V, F11, ctrl+"=", ctrl+ "-"). I use tmux for everything and I really love that I can "debloat" the shortcuts and don't have to care about colliding keybinds when configuring things like neovim.
Terminator.
I use the broadcast, zoom, grouping, and the guake/yakuake style dropdown. Also it has layout switching like xmonad, ie you can ctrl + space to cycle pane layouts.
Gotta love terminator. I also always greatly appreciated how uncluttered and to the point its ui was, while being modern and configurable.
Alacritty (with tmux if I need a multiplexor)
You might also be interested in checking out Zellij, it's like tmux with nice defaults
Konsole does everything I need it to.
Are there any decent plugins for it?
Also does anyone know how to fix profile colors no longer working in the SSH plugin?
Foot if you're on Wayland, alacritty if you're not.
Kitty. Fast (GPU-accelerated), Wayland-compatible, and has a built-in image viewer, among other things.
Alacritty
No particular reason why. It's fast, it works, and I've already got it configured how I like it.
I've used kitty and a couple others. It really doesn't make much difference to me tbh.
Kitty, because I like it more than the KDE and GNOME terminals, and I prefer native multiplexing
Gnome terminal
wezterm. Works great on wayland and the documentation is amazing. And it's built in rust if you're one of those people.
I use wezterm on wayland. It has built in tabs so its better than just using another window or tmux imo
Hooray, I found another WezTerm user here so I didn't need to comment.
It is a multiplexer like tmux, so it's essentially 2 in 1
Yes very useful. I hated no built in tabs bc I used "npm run dev" to run my site so I had to open a new terminal to code it.
I like yakuake, I'm spoiled by the drop-down terminal at this point
I used to love yakuake. Really convenient
It's become really sleek looking too. When I first started using it the UI looked kinda clunky.
Alacritty, no particular reason. It's fast and I already made it look how I want so there is no reason to switch.
Using alacritty for years on all linux devices, it does what its supposed to do. Recent change to toml configuration was a bit of hassle. But with the latest release the migration is no problem anymore.
Honestly didn't even know they migrated to toml. I upgraded and it said yaml wasnt supported anymore. I used alacritty migrate and only had to remove a couple deprecated options and it was fine.
It's why I keep it. It's set and just seems to work well.
+1
So Konsole rocks. Yakuake a great addition. But I'm a big KDE fanboy
Alacritty is also pretty fun, combined with openbox / LXDE
But for the $dayjob it's Windows Terminal which is easily the best thing Microsoft has released in decades when combined with WSL
st. It just works. I'm always opening and closing terminals, and 90% of the stuff I use have's a TUI. st launches before I can even notice, under 4GB of RAM, and the entire install is less than a MiB.
I've been scrolling with no hope to see st anywhere but here it is! Only mentioned twice for now but this little guy deserves so much love. Yes, you have to build it (i.e. patch it) but that's actually it's beauty. You get the exact terminal you want, nothing more, nothing less. If you're looking for power and lightweight this is your guy.
Coupled with tmux and you're the God of your system :)
I'm partial to a bit of Tilix personality.
Sounds like there's a ton of options but this is the first one I've found that supports copy-on-highlight and that's a must for me.
Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me
Kitty for both X and Wayland - I like the customization (as in I already have the config file that I have backed up and can just plop it in), it works perfectly on any VM (used it on sway, hyprland, i3, awesomewm), though honestly I don't see much of a difference between the terminal emulators. There's literally no wrong choice or meaningful difference in my experience at least, but admittedly I just use a terminal emulator to run commands, neovim and system file editing.
Yeah same here, at some point I ended up settling on Kitty and now I'm used to it and there's no reason to change, but pretty much any terminal emulator will do the job just fine.
Gnome Terminal. I've tried out a few others, but at this point I'm kind of partial to just using the default with good integration with the rest of the desktop. Pop, in this case. I'm curious if they'll adopt something else for the terminal in COSMIC.
Edit: They just recently announced COSMIC Terminal, so that's a yes. I look forward to trying it out. It's based on alacritty's framework.
Since you sound like you know what's going on with Pop I'll ask: what is Cosmic? I understand it's a DE, but is it replacing Gnome entirely and a new DE built from the ground up? Seems like every update assumes you know more than I do :)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm mostly talking out my ass. But as far as I know, it's a new DE that's being written in Rust using the iced toolkit. It looks like they're aiming to be Wayland native without the X baggage. It's been a while since the last full Pop release (20.04), so it will be nice to get the rest of the OS upgraded as well.
No love for Terminator?
I spend my day working on it. Multiple tabs, multiple vertical and horizontal panes, good keyboard shortcuts, profiles, themes... What more do you want?
Terminator was my super goto terminal emulator the last decade or so. Love it.
Recently switched to foot, because of GPU acceleration, touch screen support and wayland amongst others.
But I miss splitting windows and being able to send keystrokes to multiple windows/groups.
Try Terminator if you haven't - it's really nice!
Konsole and Yakuake... It's sufficient
I've really grown to like yakuake. I always have a sorta "main terminal" where I have a tmux session going and now I do that in yakuake so it's available on all desktops and easily put "out of the way" when I don't need it.
I'm high AF and new to Linux, what is a terminal emulator?
So the “terminal” is the basic CLI that you use in the single-user, text-based mode. Terminal emulators are graphical programs that run in multi-user, graphics-based mode, and they hook into the terminal and allow you to access it inside graphical sessions. Some examples would be alacritty, kitty, urxvt, konsole, or terminator
Fun fact!
Teletypes predate "computers" and were used for efficiently transmitting and recording text.
Here is a purely mechanical teletype from the 1930s being used to interface with a modern Linux machine:
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
In overly simple terms
It's a terminal app on your desktop, e.g. alacritty, konsole, kitty, terminator, urxvt, etc.
As opposed to the terminal that your computer would boot into it you didn't have a desktop environment installed.
Basically just a more accurate way to say terminal
Kitty, but I don't have any particular reason it's just there and it works
I use WezTerm. Highly configurable and supports every image display protocol under the sun.
Konsole and yakuake as the drop down for quick tasks
And of course, the terminal pane inside dolphin
Oh my god I've been using this shit for years and just found out about this. I've never seen it enabled. This is awesome! Thanks.
I love the terminal pane in dolphin. I use it all the time.
Big fan of kitty for font ligatures support and how splits/tabs work
I like Kitty since users can configure the terminal to always turn off ‘programming ligatures’ (aka ligature misuse).
whatever ship with the distro when I want to open a terminal...
rxvt-unicode with tabbedex.
I refuse to use a terminal emulator that needs more than 100MB of RAM to display 80x24 green text on a black display
Alacritty (with screen if I need a multiplexor)
I like the slide-down ones so Guake or ddterm (a Gnome shell extension). I always remap caps lock to control and the “Caps Lock” + tilde shortcut to get to the terminal is such a part of my muscle memory that I think I’d lose my mind trying to change at this point.
st
Alacritty in case Konsole breaks
I use what the DE usually provides, which is Konsole in Plasma. I don't need fancy stuff as I only do basic stuff in the terminal.
Kitty as I need X11 support & I use the kittens it comes with too. Kinda which more applications used their drawing API to get images on the screen.
Konsole, but only because I'm on Plasma. I really don't rven like it that much, but... well, it's a terminal, it does terminal things so I'm more than OK with it.
On xfce, I would youse xfce-terminal.
anything is fine as long as basic stuff works - like ctrl/shift+insert (tho it's a thing I had to manually setup in Konsole 😅)
I don't care much for the terminal, but I noticed that I care a lot about my shell and the tools I use in it.
And the prompt - can't live without my ASCII bling-blink.
No love for xfce4-terminal around here?
#1, whatever is default. The main advantage of the terminal is that it's just a terminal, fundamentally the same terminal since the dawn of computing.
Having said that, I do sometimes install a non-default terminal. I haven't seen any of them mentioned:
cool-retro-term It looks like an OG CRT! What other terminal emulator has this killer feature?
Byobu Technically a front end for tmux, but it gives some useful status info and multiple windows.
Black box. If you use Gnome, highly recommended.
st
Can't live without Yakuake/Guake
Contour currently, but might consider that new one by the cosmic team. Contour is a bit minimalistic like alacritty or foot, yet it ligatures (a weird dealbreaker of mine). Goes well with zellij (pretty neat stuff, if u ask me, although breaking sixel is unfortunate, but they're working on it).
Used to use kitty and weztetm, the latter was overall less confusing (generally faster, no need to use quirks for ssh). And then wezterm broke on Wayland :D
I like st and kitty depending on the task
XFCE's. TERMIMAL set to linux, because something sets it to xterm, which does weird shit.
Formerly I used Terminator, because I liked to split the screen. Then I moved to Kitty because having a GPU-powered terminal sound amazing, and now I'm using gnome-terminal because I'm trying to get back to simply and default.
konsole