I’m reconsidering my terminal emulator and was curious what everyone was using.
I just use
konsole, which is the default terminal emulator for KDE. I don’t need anything fancy, just something basic to run commands, updates, a few scripts, etc.Same. I do have gnome on my laptop and the terminal was lacking relative to my KDE desktop, so I ended up making the switch there too
cool-retro-term 😎 to live in retro cyberpunk dreamland
Wow that is actually way cooler than the original terminals. Thx!
I ike konsole
Konsole with a side of Yakuake is perfect for me.
I primarily use Alacritty. I spend quite a lot of time running things that produce ludicrous amounts of output (eg. compiling Android from source). Out of 10 or so terminal emulators I’ve tested earlier this year, it was the only one that didn’t use 100% CPU displaying all that output, staying in the low single digits.
I’d prefer to use Wezterm because I like its lua configuration system and the builtin pane splitting, but with my workload, I still run into issues where its CPU usage shoots to 100% and becomes non-responsive for a while. (That said, it’s already a lot better than before. I try to report any issues I can reliably reproduce and Wez has been wonderful about fixing them.)
It really does not make sense a terminal consuming 100% CPU, so Alacrittycis my choice as well
foot is great. Simple, fast, and customisable enough for my needs.
I like my kitty
Personally I’ve been using gnome-terminal for quite a while and was fairly happy except that I needed to maintain gnome-terminal and libvte patches to get notification support. Having some sort of notification when a long-running command completes is very important to my productivity.
I’ve been using Konsole but not fully happy.
- No hyperlink support.
- Selection is lost when my prompt updates (I have the time so that I know when I have started commands).
I’ve been looking at other options but none-of them feel quite right.
Alacritty:
- No unlimited scrollback.
Kitty:
- Selection bug with updating prompt.
- No unlimited scrollback.
Wezterm:
- No unlimited scrollback.
Terminator:
- Has this terminal group bar that I can’t get rid of.
- No notification support.
I realize that I am probably going to have to make a compromise (probably just go back to gnome-terminal with patches) but I figured it would be interesting to see what everyone else was using and make sure I didn’t miss something.
To me the important features are:
- Unlimited scrollback.
- Notification support (ideally with the 777 Notify command, but if the terminal bell can make a notification that is fine).
- Clean UI. (I don’t use tabs so need to be able to hide the tab bar)
- Hyperlink support.
I’m pretty sure you can set alacritty and kitty to a ridiculously high number of scrollback lines, like at least several trillion. I think I just add 4 zeros on to the default and I’ve never had enough output for it to run out of scrollback. At some point you’re going to run out of ram or storage for storing scrollback so you can’t realistically have unlimited scrollback without doing something ridiculous.
When I’m using a tiling window manager, I use kitty, because I like its speed and support for font ligatures. When I’m using a Desktop Environment like Gnome or KDE I usually don’t use the terminal at all, but if I need it, I use the default emulator.
Sorry for the off-topic question, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around basic linux concepts: you use “tiling window manager” and “desktop environment” as if they were mutually exclusive options. What’s the relationship between them?
Thanks!
I don’t know if I’m correct, but in my head, a window manager JUST manages windows. Gnome and KDE also manage windows, but they also contain applications for settings, printing, etc. Desktop Environments also have window managers, but they have more applications on top.
So, just to check I understood:
- “[Tiling] Window Managers” are a very specific tool.
- “Desktop Environments” are broader tools that (may?) contain Window Managers.
Now… the next questions (if you have the patience :P) are:
- is is possible to use a Window Manager without a Desktop Environment?
- how does this influence your choose for the terminal emulator? Ó_ò
Thanks for the answers!
- Yes, you can absolutely use a WM without a DE. A DE is usually just a set of preconfigured and pre-installed applications. If you use a WM like i3 etc. you just get something that draws windows, and no settings and bluetooth applications
- It influences my choosing because window managers usually don’t come with a terminal, and you have to manually install a terminal emulator. But on desktop environments I use the default terminal, although I could also install kitty.
Oooh… I see. I didn’t understand how broad the Desktop Env really are. Is not that they manage “a lot of things regarding the desktop and windows”… is just like a bundle of apps.
Now it’s starting to sound like a sub-distro inside the distros, but I think this is a good point to stop bothering you. Thanks again!
You’re welcome!
Alacritty is great, but I switched to wezterm due to ligatures support
I use wezterm, but there are many good ones
Love it, works nice in my Mac and Linux PCs.
I’m using foot since I’ve installed sway and it’s just fine …not a super user to evaluate well
foot
Foot works fine here also.
Anything, but with tmux running inside. You can copy text even in a tty, split the terminal window, detach from and attach to tmux sessions, etc. I will never use a terminal for any moderately complex task without tmux again :)
Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as “A high-end terminal for low-end systems”.
Gnome terminal. I don’t really care the terminal emulator. What’s in the terminal is what’s important. The terminal window just needs to be able to resize correctly though.
Whatever gets me connected to my tmux session over ssh
