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

  • bugsmith
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    528 months ago

    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).

    • @harderian729
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      78 months ago

      I love Konsole. Most KDE products are extremely solid… aside from their dumb names.

      Ugh. Imagine if they chose gems instead of ‘K’.

      • @grue
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        48 months ago

        “gemsonsole” is an even dumber name, though.

        • @harderian729
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          18 months ago

          No, like naming things after gems.

          “Sapphire” would be a good name for a console, for example.

          • @infotainment
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            18 months ago

            Let’s not write off Gemonsole™ yet, that’s an amazing name

    • @[email protected]
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      68 months ago

      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?

    • @genie
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      08 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      128 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…

    • @mumblerfish
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      78 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      98 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

    • @ObsidianZed
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      48 months ago

      I just started using Konsole and so far it’s ticking all my boxes.

  • @[email protected]
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    288 months ago

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

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

  • Bankenstein
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    8 months ago

    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]
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    208 months ago

    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

    • Rustmilian
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      8 months ago

      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.

        • Rustmilian
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          28 months ago

          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.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        28 months ago

        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

    • Kata1yst
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      28 months ago

      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.

    • Elsie
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      28 months ago

      What stability issues have you encountered?

      • @[email protected]
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        28 months ago

        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

        • Elsie
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          18 months ago

          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?

            • Elsie
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              18 months ago

              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"
              
      • @[email protected]
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        58 months ago

        Damn this was my first thought too.

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

      • million
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        18 months ago

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

        • @[email protected]
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          28 months ago

          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

    • Lunya \ she/it
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      58 months ago

      Can’t argue with that, minimalism is based. (I say this as a non-minimalist)

    • @[email protected]
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      18 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    178 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.

  • Lunya \ she/it
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    168 months ago

    I like kitty because:

    • multiplexing
    • more minimal than DE terminals
    • fast
    • can display images natively
    • @[email protected]
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      38 months ago

      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”

  • @[email protected]
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    158 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.