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)
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.
I always do minimal installs, so eh... guess that is a "Yes and no" for me.
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
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.
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.
Konsole is awesome and has great integration with Plasma ofc. I'm surprised to see it barely mentioned.
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 use the one that comes with my DE, but if I am using a WM I use kitty
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. :)
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.
I usually just get by with Alacritty and Zellij, pairs pretty well together.
The one with your distro shipped with
If they care about terminal emulators, it's unlikely their distro came with one preinstalled.
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
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.
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?
foot for me
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)/¯
Foot is the best
I use whatever with zsh and oh my zsh
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)
I'm somewhere between Kitty and Ptyxis.
Ptyxis is default on Bluefin, which I'm on now.
Recommend. Really nice container integration with distrobox.
Using ptyxis even on KDE, it’s neat. Very clean and some interesting integration with distrobox, definitely recommend.
Terminator for me. It has tiles and tabs and does everything I need.
I don't know if it's the best, but kitty + zsh has been my daily driver for many years.
Alacrity or foot (foot has less features but it's faster)
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.
Tilda because you can roll it down from the top of your screen with one key press.
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
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.
It's between konsole and kitty for me. Both are great.
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