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.
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.
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.
Anything is fine unless you’re using the terminal very heavily. Almost all of my workflow is within the terminal so I want everything to be as fast as possible. I want a minimal, low config, fast terminal that has the exact same behavior when using the same config on Linux and MacOS (I know, fuck me, I have to use it for work). And those are Alacritty and Ghostty. I hate Alacritty’s horrible icon so I use Ghostty.
I use Yakuake almost exclusively. I was wondering how difficult it would be to modify it to open from the bottom of the screen instead of the top.
…weird. I don’t understand why drop-down terminals are a thing? I can bring up Konsole with a hotkey too, only it just opens a window instead fo doing a fancy animation. That’s such a tiny part of its functionality that I can’t imagine how ‘drop-down’ became a descriptor for a terminal instead of just a bullet point on a feature list somewhere, much less a whole-ass category of terminals, lol.
But, fair enough.
…weird. I don’t understand why drop-down terminals are a thing? I can bring up Konsole with a hotkey too, only it just opens a window instead fo doing a fancy animation. That’s such a tiny part of its functionality that I can’t imagine how ‘drop-down’ became a descriptor for a terminal instead of just a bullet point on a feature list somewhere, much less a whole-ass category of terminals, lol.
But, fair enough.
Totally agree that objectively it’s a tiny part. However, for one, I’𝗆 simply used to it because that how terminals behave in games, and two, because terminals with drop-down as a feature were the only ones that introduced me to a one-button hotkey, just like in a game.
Sure, I get the appeal as a feature, just not as a descriptor/category.
I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don’t know about.
If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn’t have all that fancy stuff that I don’t need (and that takes up cpu cycles).
The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you’re a serious terminal user.
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
I think that’s a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don’t understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.
Fair, I’m definitely not a ‘serious’ terminal user.
Yeah I was wondering about that, it’d be nice to have an LLM that’s specifically trained on like linux system configs and shit, but that’s well beyond the scope of my capabilities, so if it doesn’t already exist I’m just SOL on that one.
Yeah I mean even if it was trained specifically for that, they often will still be incorrect because they don’t actually understand the concepts they’re presenting.
Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)
I agree. I think OP should try another shell first. That will impulse the use of the terminal. I’m using alacritty because it stuck and the updates are minuscule, but I’ve recently moved to fish and have it on desktop and server.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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
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.
Umm, what I said: the updates happen faster. If you have a GPU maybe you should try it?
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
I’m using Kitty. Kitten ssh is smooth as I ssh into other machines a lot. I also love being able to split the screen and have tabs. I use Kitty session a lot, I have a pre-configured yaml file that just sets up the terminal for me. I like the keyboard shortcuts too.
Wezterm has been my daily for years. Has enough extras to let any crazy terminal app work as intended but doesn’t try to do too much.
Ghostty 👻
What’s so great about Ghostty?
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.
