So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
Kitty if you have a GPU and run programs that have a lot of output (build scripts and emerge). It uses the GPU for better performance.
kitty is great, for me it’s similar to mpv: it does what it’s supposed to do, no fluff. Just straight up performance.
Kitty is great until you SSH into a machine where it’s not installed and try to use tmux or some other commandline apps
@flashgnash @Laser Connecting once with its ssh kitten resolves this by uploading appropriate terminfo files to the user’s directory.
I didn’t realise it was only once you had to use it
@flashgnash Yep, just once to transfer the terminfo files and resolve this.
The SSH kitten is pretty useful though. If you use it in combination with kitty’s --single-instance mode, you can start new kitty windows in the same SSH session without logging in again using its shared connection feature. Hugely convenient for how I work at least.
I have used it for that feature before, is there not a concern around defense in depth there though? If you’ve got a rogue program running could it not then hijack your ssh connection and infect that machine as well?
If it’s a machine you have control over you can install the terminfo. Or setting the TERM variable to something like xterm-256color when connecting, that usually works, though I haven’t tried with tmux.
I usually just change TERM to xterm but I’ve heard that isn’t a good way to do it
Also I’d rather not install stuff on every server I ssh into, I’ve installed it on test servers but wouldn’t want to do it on prod
I’ve never had issues with TERM=xterm
On Cosmic you can tile multiple windows in tabs. Tabs are essential for me, I tried Alacritty (and it had quite some issues but I got it to work) and switched back to Konsole
I’ve been really happy with Kitty.
Oh, I’m missing out on the latest “xyz dev is a jerk” drama again? Oh well …
I use Kitty, it’s a great terminal emulator that is easily extendable and gives me all the features I like.
I can’t recommend kitty enough it’s really great!
Konsole and Kitty are objectively better than alacrity. So it’s a question of which of those to use. Konsole if you use the Breeze application style, and Kitty if you don’t. Konsole has the best keybinds and it actually has a scrollbar, but kitty doesn’t require breeze.
Konsole doesn’t require Breeze. It’s themable, like most KDE applications. It does ship with a Breeze terminal color scheme, but that’s just the default. Many more are available out of the box and creating new ones is easy.
QT apps don’t look right without breeze imo
Call me boring, but I really like the Gnome terminal.
There was one terminal that blew my mind in terms of speed and features, and it was Kitty: it’s properly fast and it’s packed with fantastic features, such as the ability to display images and play videos in the terminal itself.
However, I uninstalled it because it did one thing that really, REALLY rubbed me the wrong way: by default, it phones home to find updates.
Any software that phones home behind my back, even with good intentions, and particularly something as essential as a terminal in which you type all sorts of passwords, gets a hard pass from me. But if you don’t mind, I highly recommend it.
by default, it phones home to find updates.
Do you have a source for that? I just did a rough check using nethogs (on my Arch box) and I didn’t see any connections originating from kitty.
I also found this comment from the author mentioning that he wasn’t a fan of automatic updates (which implied it wasn’t a feature).
and no I dont want to do automatic updates, am not a fan of those. If and when you have an issue or want to try new functionality, its just a simple command to update it.
Do you have a source for that?
Yeah, my own eyes: it told me an update was available. That alarmed me enough to look around, and I found a toggle in the config file to disable automatic update checking. It was on by default.
Then I promptly uninstalled it. Too bad, because I really liked it.
EDIT: maybe I wasn’t clear: it doesn’t auto-update, it checks for updates. Slight difference. What bothers me with that is that it does networking operations when a terminal has no business doing any networking at all.
Hmm, sounds like you used a binary build that wasn’t packaged by your distro, which explains why I didn’t see any network traffic from my Kitty which I installed from the Arch repos. The config docs mentions this:
update_check_intervalThe interval to periodically check if an update to kitty is available (in hours). If an update is found, a system notification is displayed informing you of the available update. The default is to check every 24 hours, set to zero to disable. Update checking is only done by the official binary builds. Distro packages or source builds do not do update checking.
Ah right. Well it’s possible, I don’t really remember. That was quite some time ago.
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I’m just curious, when do I have to care about virtual terminal speed? When do you need that GPU acceleration?
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Just tried “time tree ~” and “time fd .mkv /” in alacrity and konsole. Konsole was actually beating it by fractions of a second in most runs. Alacritty was only slightly faster at treeing after a few runs.
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Konsole can display sixel images (same as kitty I believe), though I don’t know anything about it’s implementation.
I’ve used GNOME’s terminal, Konsole, kitty, st, cool-retro-term, Alacritty, foot, and Wezterm.
The things I want from a terminal emulator are:
- Ligatures
- Customisability
- Icon support / good font management
- High-ish performance
Wezterm is afaik the only one with all of those.
Konsole is actually a pretty good terminal emulator, its big downside is that it looks horribly out-of-place in anything other than Plasma. So as long as you stay on Plasma, Konsole is a good choice. If you ever move to a WM or something, I recommend foot or Wezterm.
Alacritty has some degree of customisability, Konsole has more, but either way it’s nothing when compared to Wezterm. It is really fast though!
The thing that skews the duel in favour of Konsole for me is the ligature support. I use neovim for programming and we all know code ligatures are a godsend, so ligature support in the terminal is very much a thing that I want.
I found Wezterm to be quite nice.
Same, nice to see it get some love. I’ve tried a whole bunch of them, Wez is also a super nice guy and very active on GitHub.
If you can’t give evidence, it’s not nice to spread rumours
Would be foot but monaspace font doesn’t work that well, so kitty
I just never would recommend mixing Gnome’s Terminal and Konsole. Gnome and KDE never seem to play nice with each other. Besides that, go wild.
since you seem to consider alacritty, which is pretty minimal in features, maybe give foot a shot as well. i find it fits best into tiling wm land (sway, river, etc.) so might not be your cup of tea…
Been using foot for like 5 years now. It just gels so damn well with tiling wms and super fast.
what does it better than any other terminal for twms?
It does pretty much nothing in terms of fancy windowing and layout features. No tab interface, split screens, etc. I let those handled by my TWM and it just starts really fast.
I use i3 and don’t have a mouse. Rn I’m using Alacritty because I want to keep things minimal. Is foot a good fit for my usecase?
not sure for i3, i think foot is wayland-only. but i have the same setup with sway and am very happy
Wherever possible I use the XFCE defaults, as I basically turn Budgie into XFCE. So I use the XFCE-Terminal, and it’s probably the most comfortable TE I’ve tried.
