I’ve always just used konsole or gnome terminal. Never really looked into what else is available. Tried cool-retro-term the other day, but the novelty wore off pretty fast for me.
Curious to see if there’s a terminal someone swears by and refuses to use anything else.
rxvt-unicode - lightweight and nearly perfect, and one of the few that handles fonts well.
Konsole for regular stuff, kitty for neovim.
st. Fonts look great and I’ve even been able to add a vim mode for scrollback including selecting and copying text.
If I need something fast( usually on a new system) that’s in most distros repos and automatically installs all it’s dependencies( and doesn’t have to many like gnome terminal and konsole) I tend to use sakura, though xfce terminal is also pretty good.
I don’t know the difference between a terminal and a terminal emulator, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
Lately using Foot since that’s what my distro shipped with.
What distro ships my favorite term foot?
Fedora Sericea (Silverblue variant with sway)
Garuda
A terminal is the thing that looks like it might be a computer, but nobody is home, it’s just connected to a modem. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, The Computer of your university.
A terminal emulator is, well, an emulator, so you can use a 1970’s shell, right there on your computer, just like you can emulate and play Pong or Space Invaders…
Hope that helps
Realistically, no difference.
They are called emulators because “Terminal” used to mean a full-screen text interface to a mainframe. The functionality has carried on, which is why terminals behave pretty much the same on any platform. You don’t use your system’s regular text fields in a terminal emulator, for example.
What’s your DE?
Hyprland
A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I’ve never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.
These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn’t make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.
Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.
It literally doesn’t matter
It doesn’t matter to you. There’s all sorts of reasons it might matter to other people like right click support, SSH profile management, how it handles tabs, and on and on…
Garbage features for noobs
- mouse in the terminal??
- ssh profiles?? That’s the ssh config files
- tabs?? Use NeoVim or tmux or zellij
- and on and on…
Konsole and Yakuake… It’s sufficient
I’ve really grown to like yakuake. I always have a sorta “main terminal” where I have a tmux session going and now I do that in yakuake so it’s available on all desktops and easily put “out of the way” when I don’t need it.
Same here whatever the DE has I would use.
Though most common answers from others would be alacritty or kitty which I see the use but feels advanced in configuration.
I use alacritty and I’m very very new to Linux. I actually found that working on the config files for alacritty helped me a ton with learning how to approach config files in general. So advanced maybe but simple enough to teach new users a ton of useful things.
kitty. it’s the first thing I install on a new machine.
Ditto on that.
And why do you usw kitty? For me its the hyprland default terminal emulator and I never had problems with it so I stuck with it
I tested kitty and alacrity when I first found out about advanced term emulators. I liked kitty more, but I don’t remember why. I use the kittens all the time. It’s super convenient to play a video or display an image in the terminal. Kitty works on most distros. I wish it worked on windows, too, so I could use it at work.
If you’re allowed to install WSL on your work machine, they recently (I think recently) added GUI support for linux applications.
If you install kitty on a WSL distro, you can use it like any other windows program.
You can access your windows file system from /mnt/
I don’t really know how they do the virtualization, so you may lose a lot of the performance benefits that kitty has.
Very clunky workaround, but it’s an option.
I’m partial to a bit of Tilix personality.
Sounds like there’s a ton of options but this is the first one I’ve found that supports copy-on-highlight and that’s a must for me.
Alacritty (with screen if I need a multiplexor)
Back when I was into tiling window managers and all that i’d use urxvt but now i just use gnome terminal. I can theme it nicely and it works well
Alacritty (with tmux if I need a multiplexor)
You might also be interested in checking out Zellij, it’s like tmux with nice defaults
Yakuake
Terminator
I’m partial to terminator
