best linux terminal emulator

BoxEbony@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 84 points –

what is the best linux terminal? I have been using alacritty for years and have been doing well. But I don't think kitty and st. I was wondering if any new projects have come out in recent years.

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Am I the only one that’s fine with whatever the OS provides out of the box? Like, as long as I can turn the bell off and change the font, I’m chillin, and I have yet to run into a terminal that doesn’t provide those options.

Curious to hear what drives people to seek out other options (besides tiling, that I understand, I’m a tabs guy myself tho)

I always do minimal installs, so eh... guess that is a "Yes and no" for me.

Online trends I saw on the internet was the reason I hopped around multiple terminals. Use case for me it made no difference.

There's 4 other terminals I did enjoy using but xterm became my go to after I got tired of hopping around.

Wen I first installed Linux I was like “I need the best fancy termanal” and wastes some time only not be satisfied with the results and installing tons of bloat. Now I always just use what I get by default from the distro I happen to be on 😂 I don’t even know what I want

Image display is an important feature for me. If konsole supported it, I'd just use that. If I'm on a gnome system I'll pretty much always change the terminal because gnome terminal has a lot of issues with font rendering that I find annoying

konsole does support sixel images

In my case it's resource consumption, efficiency the impact with the windows manager I use, how much is keyboard controllable. It seems strange to me that a linux user uses the default applications. The beauty of linux is the huge variety and the ability to customize. If you use allova ready-made things, a mac or windows is fine too

It seems strange to me that a linux user uses the default applications

I sorta get what you’re saying, but rather than just pick any random distro and handpick every application myself, I put effort into finding a distro which has the most default apps that I’m happy with. I use KDE Neon because I like Dolphin, Konsole, Konqueror, and the pre-installed version of VLC; however, I DON’T use the default email client, text editor, etc.

I don't know I never felt the need to customize the terminal. I just like what it comes with. It feels wrong to change that. Black background and colored text is fine. The rest of the OS though damn it's like a fucking birthday party! Nothing's at default ffs

In the past I have found myself working with laptops with few resources and small screen (eeepc). Every pixel gained was a big win, and finding equivalent lightweight, high-performance applications could make all the difference. Eventually I found the optimal solution with i3 as windows manager and alacritty was the best terminal to use together (and zsh). Since then even though I have no real need I have continued to use this approach. And in the end being careful about pc resource consumption is also an ethical choice, if the pc consumes less power it is a gain for the environment.

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What's wrong with kitty?

I've been using kitty for some time didn't had any issues, and multiplexing is useful.

PS: i used tmux for many years, and still use on headless

I personally don't use Kitty because, for me, it's much slower to open compared to Alacritty. :)

For me: Wezterm. It does pretty much everything. I don't think Alacritty/Kitty etc. offer anything over it for my usage, and the developer is a pleasure to engage with.

Second place is Konsole -- it does a lot, is easy to configure, and obviously integrates nicely with KDE apps.

Honorable mention is Extraterm, which has been working on cool features for a long time, and is now Qt based.

+1 for Wezterm, it also had image support that Alacritty didn't have, which I needed for Yazi to work.

I've heard good things about Warp too but Wezterm is where I'll be for now.

I wanted to love it, but I keep getting crashes in mixed dpi environments on wayland.

I moved to foot instead. Bare bones, but unobtrusive enough. Shame the scrollbar is jank.

People keep recommending terminal emulators, but I think they're missing your point.

I'm not aware of anyone making new terminals these days. In my opinion DIGITAL is still king. They are getting a bit hard to come by. VT220 used to be the gold standard, but a VT420 or VT520 is still worth it if you can find one.

Looks like there are a few VT420s on eBay going for up to $200. Prices aren't what they used to be.

They specifically mentioned alacritty which is a terminal emulator

Yes, and now they're looking for a real terminal

Ah yes you can tell by the post title:

best linux terminal emulator

There is no one-size-fits-all, but for fits most, you're looking at KDE's Konsole or GNOME's new Terminal (formerly Ptyxis). Everything else is going to be niche, with special use cases. What are your specific needs?

Konsole is awesome and has great integration with Plasma ofc. I'm surprised to see it barely mentioned.

Depends on what you need actually. I was doing fine with urxvt on Xorg, so foot is a perfect alternative for me on Wayland.

Alacritty. Alacritty. Alacritty. And did I mention Alacritty? (I'm just counting how many I have open atm)

Wezterm is my primary. Love the built-in domain/sshmux features, especially for work. The LUA config rocks, sky is the limit. Highly portable when using something like Chezmoi or YADM.

That said, it's not always the most performant, especially with certain TUIs. I've been running my NVim workspace in Kitty lately just to avoid the minor UI lag (primarily with lazygit). Not a fan of Kitty (or its dev) otherwise, but it serves its purpose.

If Wezterm ever gets optimized, it'll be the GOAT for me.

Ghostty also sounds like it's got potential, but haven't gotten my invite yet. ¯\(ツ)/¯

A Windows VM running Windows terminal, SSH'd back into the host, obviously.

Honestly I stick with whatever the default is and never had a problem that led me to find anything else.

what you say is completely off topic

Alacritty is fine. If you're not combining it with tmux and zsh/fish, id pluck those fruits first.

Tmux was too complicated for me so I'm using Byobu instead

Tmux with a few custom key bindings is amazing. Kind of a learning curve, but not nearly as difficult as something like Vim.

Tmux with a few custom key bindings

Yeah, like I said: Byobu! :p

Tilda because you can roll it down from the top of your screen with one key press.

Tilda is barely maintained anymore, you can get Tilix that has the same quake like feature. You can also add the quake terminal extension to your favorite alternative if you use gnome.

Is it better than yaquake? I'm genuinely curious.

It's roughly the same. I never used the tabbing features, so I can't comment. But until wayland came along, it was always there for me, working away just fine.

Terminator for me. It has tiles and tabs and does everything I need.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis

Ptyxis is my current go-to. It can detect available pods or toolboxes (maybe docker too haven't tested it) and you can open terminals directly into them. It also highlights ssh terms and root shells differently.

There are a huge number of built-in color schemes as well and I've had no trouble finding any configuration option I've found myself wanting to look for.

It's also available on flathub so it's easily installed in most distros.

Running Kitty the past year and a bit and really like it. Used to run into weird laggy issues with other terminal emulators, but Kitty runs like a beast for me.

I usually just get by with Alacritty and Zellij, pairs pretty well together.

I don't know if it's the best, but kitty + zsh has been my daily driver for many years.

Just switched from Alacritty, kitty+zsh rocks. Feels faster than alacritty, and the tutorialization of the default config is great. And it's wildly configurable.

Not a new project, but I feel is often overlooked: Sakura. I’ve fallen back to it repeatedly over the years. It is lightweight, opinionated but sane. Not as brutalist as st. I combo it with Tmux using powerline with little tweaking.

It uses standard libraries and stays out of the way.

I'm somewhere between Kitty and Ptyxis.

Using ptyxis even on KDE, it’s neat. Very clean and some interesting integration with distrobox, definitely recommend.

Ptyxis is default on Bluefin, which I'm on now.

Recommend. Really nice container integration with distrobox.

Alacrity or foot (foot has less features but it's faster)

Tilix is great, complete for my needs.

I don't know why more people haven't mentioned tilix.

Makes me wonder if I'm missing out by using it 😂

It's between konsole and kitty for me. Both are great.

I've always been happiest with xfce4-terminal, though I'm using Konsole currently until XFCE fully supports Wayland.

Way back when, I was more than happy with rxvt.

I've been using xterm, urxvt, and st. Also tested alacrity, kitty, and wezterm. Your shell also plays a critical role in your terminal usage (but I won't deviate here).
For my use-case, the latter are overkill so I stayed with st. The only missing feature for me was image support even though I use it sporadically. To cover that I use a script that relies on ueberzug or ucollage if I need to browse folders.

I've wrote a small post about ucollage if you're interested.

Surprised nobody mentioned Yakuake. Just discovered it's just for kde. Been using it for years. It hides at the top of my screen and slides down when the cursor hits the top. Full desktop when not used and can access it no matter which app I'm using.

Cosmic term is nice. Still just alpha, so there are rough edges though.

I see is a alacritty fork. what does it have more?

Splits, ligatures tabs and more

Since we are talking about terminals, you are probably talking about abuse of ligatures

Well, that was something.... I have used ligatures in my code editor for quite a few years now, and I have NEVER been confused about the ambiguity this person is so upset about. Why? I have never ever seen the Unicode character for not equals in a code block, simply since it is not a valid character in any known language. In fact, I have never even seen it in a String where it actually would be legal, probably since nobody knows how to type that using a standard keyboard. This whole article felt like someone with a severe diagnose have locked in on some hypothetical correctness issue, that simply isn't a problem in the real world.

But, if you for some reason find ligatures confusing, then you shouldn't use them. But, just to be clear, there is not a right of wrong like this blog post tries to argue, it is a matter of personal taste.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68

ALGOL 68, mother of all the C-likes, has ≠. There ace quite a few languages support Unicode such as ≠. What is not equals then? Exclamation mark + equals? Forward slash + equals? Tilde + equals? Less than + greater than? Equals + forward slash + equals. What is more clear than all of those aforementioned options from ‘modern programming languages’? 2260 ≠ Not Equal To. Type what you mean, specifically. Your programming language doesn’t support it? Your language is hurting clarity.

Good to know that every time I feel the need to use ALGOL 68, I must remember to disable ligatures. Still not sure this is going to be a huge problem 😂

No need to ignore history. Older ALGOL versions used several now-Unicode operators. A lot of language support it. You have most of the APL + its dialects (such as BQN), theorem provers like Agda and LEAN 4, functional languages supporting Unicode Preludes like Haskell and PureScript, MATLAB, Mathematica, RPL, Raku, Julia, AppleScript, and of course the TI BASICs. Not to mention ≠ is what is used in general math(s) & handwriting. All this to say, it’s more common than you are leading on.

Are you saying that it is common that people use utf8 characters that you cannot easily type on a standard keyboard? I'm very skeptical of this claim.

APL programmers usually use an APL keyboard layers. Some people use Compose. Vim offers digraphs. Some editors can replace with a macro. Input is a solved issue, but the outputs can often either be more clear for reading either for lack of ambiguity such as the ligatures or in information density as seen especially in the APLs (see a 1975 demo) (hence Chinese writing taking up less paper space being more information dense). The ligatures themselves are still taking up the same physical character space since that is how ligatures operate. I believe the goal here is to achieve something similar with ligatures, except taking an opentype hack instead. If you believe ligatures are more readable, then everyone should be seeing these concocted symbols on any device or font, which Unicode offers without the hacks or ambiguity.

ghostty looks promising, but it's in "closed beta" for now. When it's released, it will be public and open source. :)

Foot because it's sway default. It's also configurable, has shortcuts and sixel support.

Xterm for me. As others have shown there are other ones that are newer than that but Xterm has become my favorite.

all of the fancy features that other terminals provide, I get with Tmux, so any emulator for me. I like transparent themes and that's easy to set up in Alacritty, so that's what I usually get

I had to switch recently because I wanted to try out font ligatures and it turns out Alacritty refuse to implement support for that 😬

oh I think I've come across that yeah. not a fan of them personally, so not something that I would notice lol

I run multiple terminal apps. I thought I would try a few, and I never deleted any of them.

I consider st a great choice when using i3 or dwm. Customizing it takes time, but RAM usage is what I usually check and in case of st it is comically small.