1mo ago

The Terminal Question

I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I'm curious what the good options are for terminals. I've skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they're too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I'm just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I'm aware that there's not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I'm curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Personally I've just been using konsole since it's what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I'm missing out on features I don't even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i'm doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

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The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you're a serious terminal user.
One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such
I think that's a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don't understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.
- Fair, I'm definitely not a 'serious' terminal user.
  Yeah I was wondering about that, it'd be nice to have an LLM that's specifically trained on like linux system configs and shit, but that's well beyond the scope of my capabilities, so if it doesn't already exist I'm just SOL on that one.
  
  Yeah I mean even if it was trained specifically for that, they often will still be incorrect because they don't actually understand the concepts they're presenting.

Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)
- I agree. I think OP should try another shell first. That will impulse the use of the terminal. I'm using alacritty because it stuck and the updates are minuscule, but I've recently moved to fish and have it on desktop and server.

Konsole, because it fits in nicely with Plasma (as you would expect) and does everything I need a terminal to do.

Are you serious? It's just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I'm mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don't need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can't imagine what other features may I need.
- GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.
  
  What do you want to accelerate? And for what you need more than 256 colors?
- That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.
  The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?
- Multiplexing, remote multiplexing, shell integration, SSH integration, image rendering, ligatures, image rendering (mainly for TUI file managers like Yazi), support for font styling, scrollback searching, persistent sessions.
  Many of these might not matter to you, but I use a lot of these features very frequently, especially remote multiplexing which only Kitty and Wezterm do AFAIK.
  I also paricularly like Westerns feature where you can press a keybind and itll show two character flags over all the links and paths currently being displayed, and you type the flag to copy it. Let's me avoid switching my hand over to my mouse.
  
  Most of what you enumerated is not a terminal emulator job. There is tmux for multiplexing, search and persistent sessions, for instance. And if you want image rendering, what a hell you use TUI for this? GUI programs can also be controlled with keyboard.
- Yeah I have been, I've just seen discussion about terminals that do all kinds of fancy shit and I'm wondering if I'm missing out on features by using the default (konsole), though it seems fairly full-featured. shrug

I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don't know about.

kitty. The ssh kitten is enough reason to use it. I work ob a lot of different systems that require OTP. Using the ssh kitten I can type the OTP once and can spawn new terminals that ssh and cd to the remote direvtory without logging in again. Obviosly the tabs and window panes are are a must too. There's tons of other useful features that I like, like using hints to select nunbers, filenames, urls, etc in the terminal output.
- And most importantly, you can play arround with pretty kittens 😁

Alacritty, one of the first rust based terminals. Fast, simple config. Had no problems. Foot as a second if you want an alternative.
- I typically use both alacrity and kitty depending on what I'm trying to do

I use xfce4-terminal, lxterminal is also good for the same reasons. The nice thing about them is that their configs are very stable (this can be a bit of an issue with KDE, e.g. I recently had to redo my editor themes for Kate because the old ones weren't compatible anymore), and they save system resources by letting all terminals run in one process. Running terminal windows in separate processes might protect you from crashes, but even though I use terminals heavily I just never have terminal crashes. And they're simpler to configure than e.g. urxvt.

You don't really need anything fancy, but... I use Kitty because why not make things pretty

Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.
Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I'd install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I'll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.

Anything is fine unless you're using the terminal very heavily. Almost all of my workflow is within the terminal so I want everything to be as fast as possible. I want a minimal, low config, fast terminal that has the exact same behavior when using the same config on Linux and MacOS (I know, fuck me, I have to use it for work). And those are Alacritty and Ghostty. I hate Alacritty's horrible icon so I use Ghostty.

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.
OP, to be frank, descriptions like "general terminal stuff" and "nothing terribly fancy" are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you're (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.
what do you folks use
Ptyxis
and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?
Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.
One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.
Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.
- Sorry, by 'general terminal stuff' and 'nothing fancy' I mean I just like edit config files, run system commands, that sort of thing. But yeah I'm not like doing complex data management or programming or whatever.
  I'll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!
  
  No worries, fam! And thank you for clarifying! Based on your answer, I'll assume that Konsole should suit you more than well for the time being. The moment you're starting to 'live' inside a terminal is when looking elsewhere for something more advanced and/or powerful starts to make a lot more sense.
  I’ll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!
  Aight. Glad to hear that you're interested! Have a good one, fam 😉.

If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn't have all that fancy stuff that I don't need (and that takes up cpu cycles).

i just use xterm. it has proper unicode support now and is very lightweight. or maybe urxvt if i need more features.
on termux where xterm doesn't run i use st instead, it needs some source patching (very barebones) but it works pretty well.

Ghostty 👻
- What's so great about Ghostty?

I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don't need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn't have this really handy theme switching feature.
That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn't as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.
- I concur it just works good choice

I like guake, or yakuake.. they are inspired by the console in Quake. F9 drops it down and hides it. Works for what i need it to. I'm just a guy who recently ditched windows, not a power user.

I'm using st with tmux. It's in written in c, simple configuration can be done by editing the header file(s). More complex customization (such as visual bell or transparency) can be done via patch files.
Not the most beginner friendly terminal but super light weight and fast.
I was tinkering with ollama+deepseek and trying to integrate it into my bash functions, but gave up, because i could not supress that stupid "thinking..." prompt. Found it easyer to just have a browser window open (switching windows can become muscle memory in tiling wms like i3/sway or dwm).

I love foot. The only caveat is that it's only for Wayland (no X support).

I have determined that foot is best for me personally, like alacritty and a couple others, it is very barebones. No tabs or anything like that without tmux. But it doesn't rely on GPU acceleration and is just as fast (or faster) than my experience using GPU accelerated terminals. Easy to configure and since it doesn't have the GPU requirements it works on old hardware like a dream. Only possible issue is that it is wayland only but since that is all I like to use it is perfect.
I find a lot like ghostty and wezterm try to include too many features. All I need a terminal emulator to be is a terminal emulator. But then a lot of these then add tabs, build in multiplexers & more and it is more bloated than I like a simple utility to be. Additionally, I don't need native tabs as a lot I do in the terminal uses SSH so it is easier just to use tmux/zilji and not have to manage it as much.

Surprised that there's so few drop-down terminals being mentioned; I use Tilda but I guess they are all fine as long as they work on one's distro config. It's so handy to always have the console locked and loaded invisibly, but toggled by the press of a button.
- I use Yakuake almost exclusively. I was wondering how difficult it would be to modify it to open from the bottom of the screen instead of the top.
- ...weird. I don't understand why drop-down terminals are a thing? I can bring up Konsole with a hotkey too, only it just opens a window instead fo doing a fancy animation. That's such a tiny part of its functionality that I can't imagine how 'drop-down' became a descriptor for a terminal instead of just a bullet point on a feature list somewhere, much less a whole-ass category of terminals, lol.
  But, fair enough.
  
  …weird. I don’t understand why drop-down terminals are a thing? I can bring up Konsole with a hotkey too, only it just opens a window instead fo doing a fancy animation. That’s such a tiny part of its functionality that I can’t imagine how ‘drop-down’ became a descriptor for a terminal instead of just a bullet point on a feature list somewhere, much less a whole-ass category of terminals, lol.
  But, fair enough.
  Totally agree that objectively it's a tiny part. However, for one, I'𝗆 simply used to it because that how terminals behave in games, and two, because terminals with drop-down as a feature were the only ones that introduced me to a one-button hotkey, just like in a game.

I used urxvt on my last install, but now I'm using Kitty because urxvt on Debian isn't compiled with true colour and I didn't want to install from source.

I like minimal terminals, was using st for a long time and now I'm using foot for quite a while already. Since I'm using tmux I don't need my terminal to have any tab/windowing features

My terminal of choice nowadays is Alacritty. It's nice and clean, has a text based config file and decent feature support. The only annoyance is the lack of tabs, but I spend most of my terminal time ssh'd into a tmux session on a remote server anyway.

I'm using Kitty. Kitten ssh is smooth as I ssh into other machines a lot. I also love being able to split the screen and have tabs. I use Kitty session a lot, I have a pre-configured yaml file that just sets up the terminal for me. I like the keyboard shortcuts too.

My suggestion is you focus more on learning to use the terminal than figuring out which one to use. Switching terminals is like a micro version of distro hopping without the benefits.
I use ollama for llms, but being a terminal tool, you need to be comfortable using the terminal.
To answer your original question, I use alacritty. Minimal bells and whistles. Just a terminal.
- Uhh, switching terminals is nothing like distro-hopping, that's a ridiculous analogy. You might need to configure the new terminal, but that's it, and there's no cost or conflict.
- Fair, although I am reasonably comfortable with the terminal (just don't know all the commands and such, always having to look that sort of thing up). I used to run linux installs many years ago back when stuff like slackware and redhat were the standard distros and X was iffy at best so I've done a lot of that sort of thing, just not in like 20+ years.
  But I'm seeing lots of recommendations for alacritty, I'll check it out, though most people seem to think konsole is fine unless I have specific needs which I really don't. Thanks!

Wezterm has been my daily for years. Has enough extras to let any crazy terminal app work as intended but doesn't try to do too much.

I like Tilix
- +1 for Tilix, iirc there is some back end adjustment you have to make for full use of its features, but its easy to apply and has a link to run you though it. Once that's done, it's really customizeable and can look great.

I recently tried out some terminals but in the end it didn't really make all that big of a difference, maybe because I use tmux so I don't need split functionality. For a long time I used Gnome Console because it came with my distro but then I tried Ghostty because some people said it was the best and I also thought I was missing out. However for me it was mostly the same as before and it was cool in a way but for some reason it didn't really click. Now I am using Wezterm because other people said it's the best and what i like is that it comes as a flatpak and it is configured using Lua. But I could just go back to Gnome Console if I had to.

I like Sakura. It's lightweight.

xfce4-terminal, in wayland+niri too. Because alternatives are always missing some features or are too bloated.
- Do you use any of the other XFCE stuff with Niri? Or just the terminal?
  
  Not yet. Panel autohide is bound to the WM (notebook display is small enough already), which doesn't work with niri. Currently fiddling with Waybar. I just need a task panel, tray and clock + battery.

Cool Retro Term unless your actually running ELKS on an 8086 or happen to be reading this off a VT05 attached to a PDP-11.

Linux vtty forever! Can't cat data into the framebuffer when your desktop is getting in the way!!
Jk I use gnome terminal for everything, or whatever default is available. It's quite amazing that most of them handle all but the most niche terminal features these days.
When I need to install a terminal emulator for some reason I always go for urxvt.. but it is pretty terrible (it's a great vt but mouse interaction is clunky and graphics are old school) compared to pretty much everything else.

It's not nice to make people read through half of your post to find out your question, sir.
Moreover, does the result produced by a search engine not be sufficient? Do you genuinely want Lemmy user's opinions?
- That's why it was right there in the title? What else did you imagine I meant when I titled that post 'the terminal question'?
  And yes, I genuinely value the opinions of others (because they can explain why they hold them) over the opinions of AI-generated listicles and 10 year old reddit posts that offer no explanation. Is that not why you participate in internet forums like lemmy?
  
  That's why it was right there in the title?
  To me it wasn't. The question would be "What terminals do you guys use?"
  Please blame AI for internet search all you want, but there are ways to filtered AI-generated posts. For example, search on specific sites which you trust (I don't know, lemmy.ml as the obvious choice, perhaps?).

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