Favorite Terminal Emulator

stark@qlemmy.com to Linux@lemmy.ml – 110 points –

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?

106

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.

Second, gotta love the new rust based tools and apps getting developed. Although I've seen some weird formatting issues on windows. Linux version is solid though.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

I don't do much customizing at the terminal. Currently I use alacritty, terminator, and st. Every few years I go through a searching-for-the-perfect-terminal and get frustrated at various shortcomings.

The perfect terminal is the vt320. (I keep one plugged in to my router, since I can reach any machine from there.)

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.

I second kitty. I switched from urxvt to konsole to get support for ligatures. Then I switched to kitty because it also has ligatures, it's faster than konsole, and it's easier to configure with version-controlled files.

I don't do very much customization: font, line spacing, color scheme, and a couple of custom key bindings.

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.

I also use Kitty with the Fish shell and the Tide plugin. Looks quite fancy compared to the standard terminal.

I use kitty. I don't use its multiplexer features, but I do use its emoji picker a lot.

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'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.

I like tilix for... the tiles (and quake mode).

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

I have tried them all and this is my preferred option.

Tried it and was not much pleased. What makes it better in your opinion?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

honestly I just use what come with the DE but if I'm not using a DE then I'll install kitty

alacritty! only problem is no ligatures 😭

Kitty and wezterm do, they are pretty comparable to alacritty.

What are ligatures?

when individual characters join together. it is defined in the font. such as fi or ff in writing, or => forming an arrow, or >= looking like the mathematical form. often using when coding, to make multi-character operators look nicer.

Boring answer, but I just use gnome-terminal with 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.

I use Alacritty and have only themed its colors

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.

Gnome Console since it is consistent with the rest of Gnome and works well enough.

Tilda, because I like how I can drop it down my screen anytime by pressing one key if I need to use it.

Ayyeee, it's great to see another Tilda user!

I'm another Alacritty user. It's been my daily driver for years at this point and I have no complaints

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

On regular desktop environments I really like Guake - it’s a drop down terminal emulator similar to how old games used to do it. It’s nice for quick use here and there. Though these days I just run tilling wm with xfce-terminal. It gets the job done and still looks good.

Omg. I thought I might read the whole comment list and not see anyone else using guake. I was starting to think something was wrong with it. I've used it for years, and for my very simple needs, it just works. And I like that it's always there when I need it, hides away when I don't.

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.

I don't really have a preference for a specific TE. As long as the default background is black. And not something close to black but not quite. And as long as Ctrl-Shift-V is paste.

My favorite is Tilda, (drop down terminal) and my second favorite would be good ol' Konsole.

Mlterm because it's the only low latency terminal with modern features.

Whatever comes with the DE. I don't use it enough to have a favorite.

I am on st as 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.

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:

# XTerm's default colors
colors:
   # Default colors
   primary:
     background: '#000000'
     foreground: '#d8d8d8'
   # Normal colors
   normal:
     black:   '#000000'
     red:     '#cd0000'
     green:   '#00cd00'
     yellow:  '#cdcd00'
     blue:    '#0000ee'
     magenta: '#cd00cd'
     cyan:    '#00cdcd'
     white:   '#e5e5e5'

   # Bright colors
   bright:
     black:   '#7f7f7f'
     red:     '#ff0000'
     green:   '#00ff00'
     yellow:  '#ffff00'
     blue:    '#5c5cff'
     magenta: '#ff00ff'
     cyan:    '#00ffff'
     white:   '#ffffff'

I always liked Terminator because of the easy splitscreening.

Konsole because it does everything I need it to and naturally integrates with Dolphin, which is something I like a lot. (F4 may be my most pressed Fn key thanks to this.)

As for customization, switched from bash to fish and use some fisher plugins for added convenience, along with the Tide prompt. I still use bash for some scripts, but that's about the extent of it.

Also, I use a light theme, so feel free to crucify me.

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.

When I am on Hyprland I use foot. It is fast and well configurable.

My fallback is Gnome and inside I use the new kgx aka Console. I like that it shows in the window decoration's color when I'm working remotely or as super user.

Blackbox has the coloring feature, too.

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. :)

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

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.

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.

Used to use Terminator on Cinnamon, but now I use Konsole with bindings to split horizontally and vertically on Plasma.

Don't matter much as long as I got tmux

Unless there's a Linux tty that supports -CC, like iterm2 for macOS.

xterm. It emulates a terminal. What else would I want a terminal emulator to do?

Yakuake as it's just one button, F12, away. I do what I need and puff it's gone.

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.

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.