this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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I'm looking for a new terminal. What's your favorite one and why? Which one is popular?

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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 [[email protected]]

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

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...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

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

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Konsole. It meets all my needs.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (9 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Kitty does use GPU acceleration

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Wezterm is my daily driver.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Konsole. Never had the need to explore alternatives.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I like kitty because:

  • multiplexing
  • more minimal than DE terminals
  • fast
  • can display images natively
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

Because I agree with suckless philosophy.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

Whatever starts with Ctrl+Alt+T 😁

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

I find remapping it to Super+T natural

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Heathrow terminal E. Whops wrong community

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Kitty, because I like cats and GPU go brrrr

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Urxvt, it supports unicode

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

konsole with tmux

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Ptyxis because it's fast, modern, user-friendly and follows modern GNOME UI, and as a second alacritty

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