what is the best linux terminal? I have been using alacritty for years and have been doing well. But I don’t think kitty and st. I was wondering if any new projects have come out in recent years.
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)
I always do minimal installs, so eh… guess that is a “Yes and no” for me.
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.
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
Image display is an important feature for me. If konsole supported it, I’d just use that. If I’m on a gnome system I’ll pretty much always change the terminal because gnome terminal has a lot of issues with font rendering that I find annoying
konsole does support sixel images
In my case it’s resource consumption, efficiency the impact with the windows manager I use, how much is keyboard controllable. It seems strange to me that a linux user uses the default applications. The beauty of linux is the huge variety and the ability to customize. If you use allova ready-made things, a mac or windows is fine too
It seems strange to me that a linux user uses the default applications
I sorta get what you’re saying, but rather than just pick any random distro and handpick every application myself, I put effort into finding a distro which has the most default apps that I’m happy with. I use KDE Neon because I like Dolphin, Konsole, Konqueror, and the pre-installed version of VLC; however, I DON’T use the default email client, text editor, etc.
I don’t know I never felt the need to customize the terminal. I just like what it comes with. It feels wrong to change that. Black background and colored text is fine. The rest of the OS though damn it’s like a fucking birthday party! Nothing’s at default ffs
In the past I have found myself working with laptops with few resources and small screen (eeepc). Every pixel gained was a big win, and finding equivalent lightweight, high-performance applications could make all the difference. Eventually I found the optimal solution with i3 as windows manager and alacritty was the best terminal to use together (and zsh). Since then even though I have no real need I have continued to use this approach. And in the end being careful about pc resource consumption is also an ethical choice, if the pc consumes less power it is a gain for the environment.
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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.
They specifically mentioned alacritty which is a terminal emulator
Yes, and now they’re looking for a real terminal
Ah yes you can tell by the post title:
best linux terminal emulator
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?
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.
+1 for Wezterm, it also had image support that Alacritty didn’t have, which I needed for Yazi to work.
I’ve heard good things about Warp too but Wezterm is where I’ll be for now.
I wanted to love it, but I keep getting crashes in mixed dpi environments on wayland.
I moved to foot instead. Bare bones, but unobtrusive enough. Shame the scrollbar is jank.
Oh, is that #4948?
Seems likely! Not me, but my experience mirrors it pretty closely
Konsole is awesome and has great integration with Plasma ofc. I’m surprised to see it barely mentioned.
The one with your distro shipped with
If they care about terminal emulators, it’s unlikely their distro came with one preinstalled.
Depends on what you need actually. I was doing fine with urxvt on Xorg, so foot is a perfect alternative for me on Wayland.
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Thirded, foot for me!
Alacritty. Alacritty. Alacritty. And did I mention Alacritty? (I’m just counting how many I have open atm)
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)_/¯
I use whatever with zsh and oh my zsh
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
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.
what you say is completely off topic
Tilda because you can roll it down from the top of your screen with one key press.
Tilda is barely maintained anymore, you can get Tilix that has the same quake like feature. You can also add the quake terminal extension to your favorite alternative if you use gnome.
Is it better than yaquake? I’m genuinely curious.
It’s roughly the same. I never used the tabbing features, so I can’t comment. But until wayland came along, it was always there for me, working away just fine.
