I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I’m curious what the good options are for terminals. I’ve skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they’re too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I’m aware that there’s not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I’m curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?
Personally I’ve just been using konsole since it’s what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I’m missing out on features I don’t even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.
Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.
Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I’d install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I’ll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.
My suggestion is you focus more on learning to use the terminal than figuring out which one to use. Switching terminals is like a micro version of distro hopping without the benefits.
I use ollama for llms, but being a terminal tool, you need to be comfortable using the terminal.
To answer your original question, I use alacritty. Minimal bells and whistles. Just a terminal.
Fair, although I am reasonably comfortable with the terminal (just don’t know all the commands and such, always having to look that sort of thing up). I used to run linux installs many years ago back when stuff like slackware and redhat were the standard distros and X was iffy at best so I’ve done a lot of that sort of thing, just not in like 20+ years.
But I’m seeing lots of recommendations for alacritty, I’ll check it out, though most people seem to think konsole is fine unless I have specific needs which I really don’t. Thanks!
Uhh, switching terminals is nothing like distro-hopping, that’s a ridiculous analogy. You might need to configure the new terminal, but that’s it, and there’s no cost or conflict.
Are you serious? It’s just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I’m mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don’t need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can’t imagine what other features may I need.
That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.
The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?
Yeah I have been, I’ve just seen discussion about terminals that do all kinds of fancy shit and I’m wondering if I’m missing out on features by using the default (konsole), though it seems fairly full-featured. shrug
GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.
What do you want to accelerate? And for what you need more than 256 colors?
If you’re on a high-refresh display, the GPU acceleration allows for much faster updates. Makes it feel much smoother. It’s of course not needed, but neither is a lot of stuff we do.
This is a literal box with text on your screen, what do you mean by “smoother”?
What’s up with the attitude like gpu accelerated terminals aren’t extremely popular? If you’re fine with what you’re using, have fun and tone down the high horse.
You can just go test it out yourself. Compare using a TUI in a hardware accelerated terminal to one that isnt. If you use a lot of TUIs or very dynamic CLIs it makes a very noticeable difference
Umm, what I said: the updates happen faster. If you have a GPU maybe you should try it?
Multiplexing, remote multiplexing, shell integration, SSH integration, image rendering, ligatures, image rendering (mainly for TUI file managers like Yazi), support for font styling, scrollback searching, persistent sessions.
Many of these might not matter to you, but I use a lot of these features very frequently, especially remote multiplexing which only Kitty and Wezterm do AFAIK.
I also paricularly like Westerns feature where you can press a keybind and itll show two character flags over all the links and paths currently being displayed, and you type the flag to copy it. Let’s me avoid switching my hand over to my mouse.
Most of what you enumerated is not a terminal emulator job. There is tmux for multiplexing, search and persistent sessions, for instance. And if you want image rendering, what a hell you use TUI for this? GUI programs can also be controlled with keyboard.
Most of what you enumerated is not a terminal emulator job.
Says who? You aren’t the arbiter of what software gets to handle each job.
Tmux does a worse job than Wezterm while being more complex, a pain in the ass to configure, and feeling less native than just using the built-in tabs and panes of my terminal. Ive also had it break the output and interfere with the keybinds of many apps. Why the hell should I install and configure an extra tool when Wezterm does what I need perfect?
And if you want image rendering, what a hell you use TUI for this?
Because I like using a TUI? I do the large majority of my work in my terminal, so why should I swap out of it to look at a picture when Wezterm does it just fine? More importantly, why do you give a fuck what tools somebody uses if they work for them?
I dont give a shit about “Unix philosophy”, Wezterm works better for me at all of these tasks than any other options.
GUI programs can also be controlled with keyboard.
I have never seen a GUI file manager with the same level of control using a keyboard as the average TUI file manager.
I used urxvt on my last install, but now I’m using Kitty because urxvt on Debian isn’t compiled with true colour and I didn’t want to install from source.
My terminal of choice nowadays is Alacritty. It’s nice and clean, has a text based config file and decent feature support. The only annoyance is the lack of tabs, but I spend most of my terminal time ssh’d into a tmux session on a remote server anyway.
I have determined that foot is best for me personally, like alacritty and a couple others, it is very barebones. No tabs or anything like that without tmux. But it doesn’t rely on GPU acceleration and is just as fast (or faster) than my experience using GPU accelerated terminals. Easy to configure and since it doesn’t have the GPU requirements it works on old hardware like a dream. Only possible issue is that it is wayland only but since that is all I like to use it is perfect.
I find a lot like ghostty and wezterm try to include too many features. All I need a terminal emulator to be is a terminal emulator. But then a lot of these then add tabs, build in multiplexers & more and it is more bloated than I like a simple utility to be. Additionally, I don’t need native tabs as a lot I do in the terminal uses SSH so it is easier just to use tmux/zilji and not have to manage it as much.
Cool Retro Term unless your actually running ELKS on an 8086 or happen to be reading this off a VT05 attached to a PDP-11.
Alacritty, one of the first rust based terminals. Fast, simple config. Had no problems. Foot as a second if you want an alternative.
I typically use both alacrity and kitty depending on what I’m trying to do
I like Tilix
+1 for Tilix, iirc there is some back end adjustment you have to make for full use of its features, but its easy to apply and has a link to run you though it. Once that’s done, it’s really customizeable and can look great.
Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.
I concur it just works good choice
Konsole, because it fits in nicely with Plasma (as you would expect) and does everything I need a terminal to do.
I’m fond of guake. Single button shortcut, dropdown terminal inspired by the Quake console. I’m just a guy who ditched windows, by no means a power user.
I love foot. The only caveat is that it’s only for Wayland (no X support).
It’s not nice to make people read through half of your post to find out your question, sir.
Moreover, does the result produced by a search engine not be sufficient? Do you genuinely want Lemmy user’s opinions?
That’s why it was right there in the title? What else did you imagine I meant when I titled that post ‘the terminal question’?
And yes, I genuinely value the opinions of others (because they can explain why they hold them) over the opinions of AI-generated listicles and 10 year old reddit posts that offer no explanation. Is that not why you participate in internet forums like lemmy?
That’s why it was right there in the title?
To me it wasn’t. The question would be “What terminals do you guys use?”
Please blame AI for internet search all you want, but there are ways to filtered AI-generated posts. For example, search on specific sites which you trust (I don’t know, lemmy.ml as the obvious choice, perhaps?).
Did you miss the important part of the comment you’re replying to?
What else did you imagine I meant when I titled that post ‘the terminal question’?
Did you think ‘the terminal’ question meant something else, or are you just ignoring the whole thing because you’re dead-set on being an ass?
Dude, look, I gave you some advise on how to get information from search engines, and efficiently ask a question when that fails to deliver. If you don’t like it, simply walk away. Feel free to block me or downvote me too. Argue with me does you no good.
No, what you did is come into a productive post with a fair amount of serious engagement–and no apparent confusion about what I meant from anyone else–with an attitude and a snarky comment. I tried in my response to ignore that and sincerely engage with your question and you decided to double-down. So I’m gonna take that as a solid ‘yes’ re:dead-set on being an ass and go do something more productive with my time. Have a lovely day.
xfce4-terminal, in wayland+niri too. Because alternatives are always missing some features or are too bloated.
Do you use any of the other XFCE stuff with Niri? Or just the terminal?
Not yet. Panel autohide is bound to the WM (notebook display is small enough already), which doesn’t work with niri. Currently fiddling with Waybar. I just need a task panel, tray and clock + battery.
Linux vtty forever! Can’t cat data into the framebuffer when your desktop is getting in the way!!
Jk I use gnome terminal for everything, or whatever default is available. It’s quite amazing that most of them handle all but the most niche terminal features these days.
When I need to install a terminal emulator for some reason I always go for urxvt… but it is pretty terrible (it’s a great vt but mouse interaction is clunky and graphics are old school) compared to pretty much everything else.
