What's your favorite terminal?

GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 170 points –

I'm looking for a new terminal. What's your favorite one and why? Which one is popular?

177

Kitty, hands down. GPU accelerated; native image protocol implemented by ranger, neofetch, and more; incredibly customizable; multiplexing with multiple windows and tabs; ligature support; and much more

If anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]

How often do you use images inside a terminal?

Why having a Gpu-accelarated terminal? The computational power used by the graphical rendering of a terminal is minimal...

what kind of benefit can i expect from a gpu accelerated terminal?

I've been using it for a while now, and it is fine. But it is very often that I open htop and kitty is one of the big cpu wasters. Maybe I've configured something wrong? But yeah, sure, works.

I like Konsole.

It comes with KDE, supports tabs, themes, and loads very fast.

I don't really need more from a terminal than that. When I, rarely, need more advanced features like window splitting and session management I also use Zellij (previously I used tmux).

When I, rarely, need more advanced features like window splitting and session management I also use Zellij

Konsole does window splitting as well, doesn't it?

Yakuake is similar but drop down based (like quake). I love having a hot key to access my terminal (tabs, splits, and all). Especially when editing in vim and looking at docs in Firefox it's such a buttery smooth workflow.

Konsole is pretty good

I granted I haven't tried any outside of what comes pre-installed on whatever DE I'm currently using, but yeah Konsole is the best

terminal? i think you'll find its a terminal emulator, haha! /s

i like kitty, its fast, simple, and supports ligatures.

I've always had problems with ssh on kitty.

Gotta use the ssh kitten

I know. I still had problems even when I used that. I don't see why are there problems at all? Why doesn't alacritty have the same problem?

My favorite is Alacritty but I don't use it because of stability issues lol. Kitty is popular now. It seems to have some questionable update policy but it's fixable. It supports plugins (kittens), tabs and most of the common features. Though the configuration is done in a text file. It doesn't have a GUI for it. For that I'd recommend Konsole

Most things in Linux are configured via text files. It's one of the main principles of Linux; store configs in plain text files. Saves us from having to use awful tooling like that of the windows registry. Even most GUI config settings are just manipulating a text file under the hood.

Some people just like GUI more

Well yeah. But would you rather a GUI that stores the settings in easy to read and manipulate plain text files; Linux, or an archaic GUI that manipulates raw data and often breaks and is hard to understand; Windows registry.
Even if you prefer GUIs, you'd probably still want the data stored in plain text files for the sake of simplicity and consistency.

I prefer text files. What I meant is that not everyone does. That people like Konsole more

I agree that Konsole are Kitty are both lovely terminals that are very configurable. Kitty for text file people vim enthusiasts and Konsole for GUI lovers.

By "questionable update policy", do you mean that it is updated by the package manager when installed from official repositories but it has an auto-updater functionality for users installing it manually?

IIRC someone who compiled from source but didn't set the flag/config to disable the auto-updater was surprised about that.

I don't see the big deal of it to be honest. The vast majority of users will be installing through the package manager. If you compile from source, you can decide yourself whether you want it to auto-update. The whole point of compiling from source is the extra control, not the defaults, I'd guess. Unless you don't know what you are doing and the package was not available for your distro and in that case, enabling auto-update by default even serves that user group.

It's more about the fact that the Kitty's developer rudely and aggressively refused to disable automatic updates after a ton of requests. Some people just don't use certain software if they don't like the developer

I like kitty, but it's configuration system is completely nuts.

Alacritty was good, but had weird issues with fonts for me.

I ended up on Wezterm. Lots of modern features, performance, stability, and awesome configurability.

What stability issues have you encountered?

I can't remember all of them but now I have a weird issue that when I open Alacritty there's some loading going on in the background for quite a few seconds which I can even see on the cursor (I think it's "xdg" that's loading) and even reinstalling the system didn't help

Oh I think I know what you mean. Did you try setting your shell to something like sh instead of bash or zsh and see if it was a shell startup issue?

sh is just an alias for the default shell. And also idk how to set that

And your default shell is a POSIX compliant shell, usually dash or ash, so that's what I mean by sh. You can set it in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml with:

[shell]
program = "/bin/sh"

Wezterm is my favourite because it's really configurable and supports ligatures. Konsole is also quite nice. Generally I'm in favour of using whichever one comes with your DE, or Wezterm if you use a WM.

Kitty is probably the most popular one, but I don't like it cause no ligature support no acceleration it claims it has good font management, but fonts never worked properly in my experience.

Alacritty and Foot are also popular for their performance. Alacritty does have some stability issues though.

Konsole. Never had the need to explore alternatives.

after rebinding ctrl/shift+Insert, it really is all one needs.

People out here talking about graphics card accelerated terminals as if they're able to read text that scrolls by on a non-accelerated terminal.

Konsole fulfills all my needs except synchronised splits. For that, I still use tmux.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I use blackbox, looks nice and can customize shortcuts. https://itsfoss.com/blackbox-terminal/

Blackbox is a WM, not a terminal! (get off my lawn!)

Damn this was my first thought too.

Someone pass me an AARP card and a Costco-sized tube of ointment…

I used to use Fluxbox back in the day, what’s the modern equivalent?

I think Openbox is the main survivor of the *box WMs – Openbox has become pretty much the default choice for small Linux distros, either with a few utilities like crunchbangplusplus or BunsenLabs or as the base of a lightweight DE like LXDE/LXQt

This. It feels like what the new gnome-console ought to have been.

I like kitty because:

  • multiplexing
  • more minimal than DE terminals
  • fast
  • can display images natively

How often do you use the image display within a terminal?

Kitty is not "minimal" at all, it's full of superfluous features... I used it for many years and I loved it, but I wouldn't say it's "minimal"

I use foot because it's wayland native and the developer is a very nice person. Only thing missing from it for me is ligature support.

A close second for me is WezTerm. It is very full featured, although I do not use a lot of its features. Developer is also extremely nice and helpful. It does have ligature support.

I personally use tiling window managers, so I have no need for built-in tiling / tabbing features.

ST - Simple terminal https://st.suckless.org/

Because I agree with suckless philosophy.

I want to love it too. I use dwm, and tried ST for a year, but I gave up. Tmux doesn't solve every issue, and specially when you have to manage another Tmux session on a server, it gets ridiculous.

I want to use as much suckless as possible, but ST just doesn't work for me.

Ptyxis, formerly Prompt. I used urxvt for many years but eventually settled on GNOME Terminal after transitioning to the GNOME environment for most of my devices. Ptyxis is a slick and quick container-centric GTK 4 terminal that fits well with my Fedora Silverblue container-based workflow.

Well I'll throw in my endorsement for kitty. I like the ligature support, the fact that it can be configured to hide all UI, and it uses text files for configuration that I can put in my dot files repo.

There are some particular features that I use constantly:

I can yank a file path to the prompt from previous output by pressing ctrl+shift+p then f then a 1-character label. I can do the same with a git hash (or other hash) by pressing h instead of f.

I can scroll back and search previous output using only the keyboard with ctrl+shift+h which puts the terminal history in a pager.

I can get the output of only the previous command in a pager with ctrl+shift+g. Or jump to previous prompts with ctrl+shift+x and ctrl+shift+z.

I use kitty-scrollback.nvim which replaces that pager with neovim so I can use all of my editor features to search history, copy what I want, etc.

My favourite is foot. Minimal, fast, easy to configure. Wayland-only though

ADM-3A for beauty and the vim keys.

TRS-80 DT-1 for weirdness.

IBM 5251 for beam spring keys.

DEC VT320 because library nostalgia.

Kitty, it's fast and for the most part works out of the box

Alacritty, launching tmux with fish shell. The latter shell could easily have been zsh. But a good and fast terminal w/tmux is such a nice thing to have.

Any time to wish you had bothered with tmux, is when it's already too late. If you go for this, you'll never look back.

How auto tmux?

Don't know why you were downvoted. In any case, all terminals can be configured to start with a specific command and arguments. So, depending on your terminal, you might need to read the documentation, and/or search the web.

In alacritty config, this is:

shell:
  program: 
  args:
    -

Then one of these:

  1. `` is the path to tmux, and you have configured tmux to run the shell of your choice. Search the web for how.
  2. `` is the path to your shell, and it supports launching in tmux. Search the web for how.

For me, it's the second one. I use fish, and I launch it with fish --command=tmux. So the above config looks like this:

shell:
  program: /usr/bin/fish
  args:
    - --command=tmux

Alacritty because it's a minimal black rectangle, perfect for using with a tiling WM

foot is also a good choice for a minimal terminal emulator.

You forgot to mention it's wayland only. This was disappointing, it looks like it's got some nice features...

Yeah I mean there's a lot of benefits and increased security on Wayland now so it's definitely worth the transition to.

  • i'm on xfce so i'd need to change my de
  • swhkd seems to be abandoned, and i couldn't get it to run, so i'd need to change a lot about my wm setup on top of moving to sway
  • nvidia issues
  • permission issues (screen sharing for example)
  • i'd also need to replace other tools, shortcuts, etc. so they use the wayland alternatives

Definitely not worth it just to get fractional scaling, and some theoretical security improvements on an OS that's already quite secure. I tried using it for a few weeks on KDE, and I had to go back to x11 for something almost every day.

Weird, I've not required X for anything since I started using it, I also just use my Window Manager to bind hotkeys (usually Sway)

I prefer to use sxhkd for all shortcuts except for starting the terminal, and some wm specific commands. It allows me to keep a really short wm config, and have an easier time trying out new ones.

Heathrow terminal E. Whops wrong community

Heathrow is the fucking worst, I hate it so much. No windows, not enough seating because they need the space to sell overpriced cosmetics and luxury watches. Fucking keep your gate a secret until 20 minutes before departure to make sure you don’t sneak off and miss a chance to do a capitalism

XFCE-Terminal. Small, lightweight, Wayland if you use it and plenty of config without cryptic dotfiles.

Plus popularity due to it being the XFCE default and contributed towards by the XFCE team.

I like just good old gnome terminal. Theming scripts work well with it, like the gruvbox one that has like a hundred color themes. it's got all the right features. just works

I've used Alacritty for a long time, but I am looking to switch since they moved to TOML for their config file. The migration they advertised did not work, and looking for some sample files took me to a GitHub issue thread where the devs are just... dicks. It was rather easy to write a new config file from scratch, but their attitude is just ridiculous.

Wezterm, because it lets me easily disable all keymaps and then reenable only those few that I use. I use tmux to handle most things, and with wezterm I don't have to worry about tmux clashing with wezterm's krymaps.

I really like kitty. It is fast and simple but gives me all the features I would want.

Tilda, because I can bring it down my screen with one key any time.

Once upon a time, I loved Xfce Terminal. It use light and complete for the use-case I had. Then I wanted something that looked nicer with vin. So I started looking for an alternative.

I used alacrity for a long time (4 years). Then, I found kitty provided some nice stuffs that simplified the workflow for remote servers thanks to special ssh commands and session tabs. I used kitty for about 2-3 years. One thing I missed was that it's hard to integrate with other software because it implementa all it's crazy "kitty protocols" and pretend to use them even if they're compleynon-standard.

Recently, some misterious bug appeared and made it impossible to use. I switched to wezterm. I liked it could be configured in Lua, so it feels more coherent with my neovim configs. I just missed the mappings for switching terminal and send "!!" (i.e. execute last command). The special commands for copying custom configs on any ssh server was also missing, but it's easy to make a script for that. I haven't experienced too much with integrating it with other tools, but I suspect it's not better than kitty in this.

I gave a chance to konsole last week. I just asked myself why we (neovim users) all look for Gpu-accelarated stuffs. The improvement in performance is negligible actually. However, konsole is super-well integrated in the OS, with a scratch terminal (yakuake), file managers (dolphin, konqueror), text editors (Kate), and even simple browsers (konqueror). It provides all the features of wezterm. I still lack a key map for sending "!!" to a specific terminal, though. But I think the integration it offers is superior to that niche feature (that can be paired within neovim, btw).

I'm on the Alacritty/Tmux/ZSH train. Haven't any issues, other than font scaling differences between laptop and desktop UW monitor.

This is me too, but I just switched to alacritty from urxvt (due to some new bug with control characters).

I prefer my terminal to purely show text, and I use tmux for all the fancy stuff.

  • St if I use X11 wm
  • Konsole if I use KDE
  • Foot if I use wayland wm

I use ddterm. It's a gnome extension that adds a Drop Down Terminal. I quite like how easy it is to bring it up and hide it again, at the press of a button. You can even hide it without closing it, so it's great for testing web apps.

None, they all have pros & cons.
The most popular in the Linux space is probably Alacritty & Kitty.

I like Terminator for its mouse-controlled multiplexing. I also like the fact that it's made with Python, although I haven't utilized this fact in practice.

Favorite terminal? iTerm2 on mac, hands-down. Wish they would port it to Linux.

On Linux though, I usually end up using guake, as I like having easy drop-down global access to my terminal.

I don't know if it's Plasma dependent, but I love using yakuake on my laptop for the convenience of pressing F4 and it just popping up. I know there are shortcuts for making a terminal pop up, but I really like how yakuake closes itself when you click out of it.

Couldn't tell you about the technical side of yakuake, but I will say I just love the convenience more than anything else.

Used to use it a lot. However these days I prefer window'd terminals that popup with a keyboard shortcut. To answer op. I use konsole atm. Usually that suffices, I don't know what features I'm missing but I keep an eye on Warp. Tempted to write my own /again./

I like Tilix, since it lets me split the terminal with a keyboard shortcut and easily switch between terminals too. I tried using GNOME terminal + tmux, but having to hit Ctrl+b before the command I wanted got tedious fast.

Yay, there's another Tilix user out there! Been a fan for a while and the tiling is great!

Usually whatever fits in best with the DE I'm using. I'm on Pop!, so that's Gnome Terminal currently. I'm excited to see when System76's Pop!_OS's COSMIC Desktop will bring with an alacritty-based terminal emulator.

I'm on pop, swapped to kitty. It's a good step up over GNOME's

I'm going to be honest, as long as the terminal does its job reasonably well and with good readability then I'm pretty much satisfied. It's one of those tools that I want to just work well the first time. I've become a man of simple tastes in my (not so) old age.

Call me lazy, but I like terminal 1. Usually shortest distance from the station building.

Wezterm. Featureful like kitty but supports bitmap fonts.

I use kitty, specifically because of the icat kitten (that draws images on the terminal) and its integration with the lf file manager's preview.

Wezterm. I started out on konsole, and was happy with it, but then I started using zellij as my terminal multiplexer. Although zellij allows you to configure what command copies and pastes text, copy/paste on wayland and windows only works by default with wezterm. It gives me consistency across multiple DEs/OSes, with minimal configuration, which is good because I was setting up development environments for many people, with many configurations

I've tried a lot of them over the whole history of Linux, but what I use now is kitty.

Foot is the fastest and I use it as default. Second is Kitty because it uses GPU acceleration.

Is tmux not cool anymore, haven't seen anyone say anything about it?

i love tmux ! although its the only multiplexer ive used

I use tmux a lot, but it’s not my default/favorite. More like a favorite tool in the terminal kit.

Mine is yakuake simply because it's a drop down one so it integrates well into my desktop.

9term is what I use the most. Once you get used to the Plan9 way, you kind of like it. Sometimes I use Terminator as well. Konsole is like Terminator, both are good. They are both nicer than kitty for me. I tried kitty, went back to Terminator as it has menus to edit things, not just a text file.

How is plan9 compared to BSd & Linux? I only learned about it recently.

What are the stand out pros & cons compared to Linux & BSD?

What's my favourite terminal? The one that fits my desktop environment. When I used XFCE I used its terminal, when I used i3 I used kitty, and now I use blackbox on Gnome.

I like Terminator,
for it's ability to split one terminal window into as much as you want:
https://gnome-terminator.org/

In combination with Fish shell,
for it's auto completion + syntax highlighting:
https://fishshell.com/

And lastly, BobTheFish,
a nice git-aware powerline theme to go along with it:
https://github.com/oh-my-fish/theme-bobthefish

Love me some fish! Though for more complex data processing, I'm working on learning nushell. Being able to work with more complex data structures is amazing.

I like terminology

It’s quick, gpu accelerated, can natively display images, and I’m not sure what else.

I don’t use the rest of enlightenment de but have stuck with terminology for years

What are the benefits if Gpu-accelarated terminals? From my understanding, that's a really negligible difference.

I don't have one specific as my favorite anymore and currently use Konsole from KDE. If you like tinkering with files and want it highly customizable through configuration files instead a gui, then probably Kitty is the best (and the closest to being my favorite). Alacritty is also a good one, but its quite simple and lacks some features in my opinion. I didn't try too many, but these 3 are the top three I would consider using in the feature future.

I use Hyper because it’s pretty simple to setup the way you want it and carry the config across OSs.

Currently: foot

Especially for the server mode and the resulting fast startup of footclient.

Bengaluru's Kempegowda International Airport's Terminal 2.

terminator was my go to for the longest time. Nowadays, I just use default GNOME Terminal. I just need things to work and not waste time tinkering.

QTerminal, xterm, and of course, the good ol' Linux console when I don't wanna do anything graphical.

I want to say Alacritty+zellij but have not even tried that lol.

Konsole. It just works, has profiles etc. I highly recommend to change it to "launch every window in same process" to avoid multiple windows, create a new desktop entry replacing "konsole" with "konsole --new-tab".

And also learn Desktop actions, its very cool!

I have a profile with different colors that starts in my Distrobox.

::: spoiler my example desktop entry

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
TryExec=konsole
Exec=konsole --new-tab
Icon=utilities-terminal
Categories=System;TerminalEmulator;
Actions=FedoraBox;root;ssh;
X-DocPath=konsole/index.html
X-DBUS-StartupType=Unique
X-KDE-AuthorizeAction=shell_access
X-KDE-Shortcuts=Ctrl+Alt+T
StartupWMClass=konsole
Keywords=terminal;console;script;run;execute;command;command-line;commandline;cli;bash;sh;shell;zsh;cmd;command prompt
Name=Konsole
GenericName=Terminal
Comment=Command line access

[Desktop Action FedoraBox]
Name=Distrobox
Icon=fedora-logo-icon
Exec=konsole --profile Fedora-Box

[Desktop Action root]
Name=root Terminal
Icon=folder-root-symbolic
Exec=konsole -e pkexec $SHELL #or define a shell

[Desktop Action ssh]
Name=ssh to X
Icon=folder-remote-symbolic
Exec=konsole -e ssh user@IP:PORT -i /path/to/key

:::

Plasma will still display "open new window" which will instead open a new tab. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+t will also open a new tab, just as opening from Dolphin etc. Perfection!

Note that Konsole will pull in tons of dependencies, you may want to use XFCEs Terminal if you dont want that. Alacritty has no tabs which I find annoying (I hate windows).

Would be foot, but I'm using a font with ligatures so it's kitty

I do a ton of work on my homelab from my iPad with Blink Shell, and if I had to pick a favorite terminal, it would be Blink. I know this kinda falls outside the goal of your question, and with that in mind, after Blink, my favorite is Konsole.

Guake. Has been for years. I am in and out the terminal all the time, so F12 works well for me. Plus I used to play Quake and used the in game terminal to do all kinds of things. Plus I'm an old RISC OS kid and F12 was the key to get the "star line".

Call me lazy if you like, but I use GNOME terminal. Comes as standard with my distro. Does what I need. Supports fonts that aren't pixel fonts and has various look and feel tweaks accessible by GUI if I really want to get in there. I do that once after every fresh install and it's been a while since then.

Given that I loved a bit of Quake back in the day, you'd think I'd like drop down terminals like ddterm and Guake (which might not work on Wayland?), but weirdly no. I like it in a box I can move around.

I also keep the ancient xterm installed just in case and for when I get nostalgic for the old pixel fonts, but it's not exactly my go-to.

iterm2 is near perfect on macOS, for Linux I usually use Alacritty or Foot

Wezterm. It has all the features one could wish for

Favourite? Windows terminal.

Favourite Linux compatible? Vs code integrated terminal.

The one I actually use on Linux because viscose integrated terminal is not standalone? Konsole, just because it's the default In kde.

EDIT: may I know why I got downvoted? Just because I have an unpopular preference? Is this reddit?

As much as I hate Windows, Microsoft etc, I also have grown to like the Windows Terminal. Kitty is my true favorite but Windows Terminal is a close second due to the tight integration with WSL and Microsoft's cloud stuff as well as theme support and some other things.

Try out warp. They have built in Ai help, and a lot of features. The Linux version is available since 2 weeks. Cons: you need to create an account https://app.warp.dev/