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.
If you’re allowed to install WSL on your work machine, they recently (I think recently) added GUI support for linux applications.
If you install kitty on a WSL distro, you can use it like any other windows program.
You can access your windows file system from /mnt/
I don’t really know how they do the virtualization, so you may lose a lot of the performance benefits that kitty has.
Very clunky workaround, but it’s an option.
Ditto on that.
alacritty
Seconded, Alacritty has been great to me
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.
What distro ships my favorite term foot?
Fedora Sericea (Silverblue variant with sway)
Garuda
What’s your DE?
Hyprland
Wezterm. I love some of it’s features (quick search).
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.
That’s fair. I don’t think I personally use ligatures anywhere and I’m not experiencing any issues with foot after using it for a few years so I might just have to stay blissfully ignorant on this one ;)
What do you use ligatures for?
The only practical thing they provide for me is slightly better readability, and eye candy (my prompt rely on them). I like my shells functional and pretty 😁
Foot if you’re on Wayland, alacritty if you’re not.
Gnome terminal
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.
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 migrateand 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
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.
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.
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?
wezterm. Works great on wayland and the documentation is amazing. And it’s built in rust if you’re one of those people.
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.
Ah, ok. That makes more sense. I really like the OS so far. Made my first leap into Linux only mid 2023ish. And it’s been awesome!
I am glad you are enjoying it so far! It has a bit of a learning curve, but it has improved significantly since I was first getting into it in high school around 2004. Wow… already 20 years.
Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me
