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I don't get the fixation people have with terminals. I don't think I've ever used one in Linux that made me think "you know, I need to install a better terminal emulator". So I just use what comes with my DE.
I am on EndeavourOS and install packages via the command line and on top of that I primarily use Neovim, so I spend a decent amount of time in the terminal
My counterpoint is terminator. The logger plugin saved my ass a few times, it remembers the commands I ran and what their output was so I don't have to.
I guess it depends on if you're willing to take advantage of the extra features, or just want to do as little CLI as possible
Nowadays I don't use the CLI much. But back in the day I used vim professionally and still didn't care. Maybe because I ran everything from within vim?
There are two kinds of powerusers, and they DO NOT understand each other one bit.
The first, like you, just wants to get shit done and want to avoid the friction of choosing/installing/configuring their tools. GNOME, Chromium, and VSCode will do just fine.
The second, like me, wants to get shit done as well, but has a strong need for a very specific workflow. I'll spend half an hour to get a toolchain working on nvim instead of using a pre-baked VSCode plugin. Not because VSCode is bad, but because I have a very (!) specific workflow and associated muscle memory and anything else distracts and unsettles me.
Some of the best engineers I know fall into either category, neither way is superior it's just how brains are wired.
Anyway I use Kitty because it allows me to split tabs into windows (not windows into tabs! ew!), has low latency with high throughput thanks to GPU rendering, and a low memory footprint.
Oh that made a ton of sense! I don't customize as much because I'm a completionist and would waste a whole week on it and not even change much from defaults anyway.
I also checked kitty and terminator and I can see the appeal. I'm used to opening separate windows and tile them using window manager commands to get a similar effect.
Thanks for your response, that was an eye opener!
Alacritty is really nice and easy to configure, and isn't "tied" to any desktop environment, like Konsole is. Kitty is really cool for its implementation of image display. Foot is a Wayland-native alternative that is also really nice to use.
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.
Foot but its limited for the averaged user. While it does support most standards its got no ui, configuration is done through a text editor and foots config file.
Personally I like it. Light weight and robust
Kitty is a great choice But I also enjoyed konsole for its SSH Alias's
I am a boring person and use what my DE gives me by default. Konsole is very good and I also use Yakuake a lot but I will also take a closer look at Kitty.
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]]
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.
I’ve been really happy with Kitty.
I have been using https://apps.kde.org/yakuake/ for years. Having the command line available with a simple key combo while not cluttering up any task manager is great.
Honestly, Konsole is fantastic. On Gnome I use Blackbox, on Sway I use Foot, but if you’re on KDE you don’t really get better than Konsole.
Alacritty and Kitty are both terminals I used to use back when I was on i3wm, they’re perfectly usable, but I don’t think the average user will gain any tangible benefit from replacing Konsole.
I’ve been using Terminator for years primarily because it’s portable. It predates a lot of the portable terminals in vogue right now. I haven’t really noticed a difference in using any of the newer ones so I haven’t switched. There’s some endowment effect there and sunk cost dotfiles.
If there’s a good comparison someone knows about that I should scope to understand what I’m missing I’m always curious!
Kitty
konsole is fast and reliableI like it
I just switched to wezterm and I’m really liking it so far. Takes some time to setup and tweak, but you can do almost anything. Works “everywhere“ too.
The only thing I’m missing so far is broadcast input.
xfce4-terminal. Runs fine without xfce4.
Kitty but only if you don't mind configuring everything in a config file. It has GPU acceleration so it will be faster than Konsole when showing 300+ lines of output on older hardware. Alacritty had a lot of issues on my installations so can't recommend it
I'm just curious, when do I have to care about virtual terminal speed? When do you need that GPU acceleration?
From my experience, you only really need it when you want to get a lot of output (try find /). In my cases it's more than 2 times faster on GPU accelerated terminal emulators. And I believe you can't display images on non-accelerated ones
Konsole is goated, legit really good.
Second to it would be Kitty in my opinion
KDE user so I use Konsole. It's great.
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
I discovered wezterm a few weeks ago and it is really neat, works even on windows. So I can share config files between my private and my work machine. It is kinda similar to alacritty but I don’t like how the developers of alacritty talk to people on GitHub, like they are really arrogant.
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...
urxvt is the only terminal I'll use. Every time I try something else I come back to it because of some basic thing that's not right - usually font rendering which urxvt is one of the few that works well with scalable fonts. It's fast and simple and does everything I need without any bloated stuff I'll never use.
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:
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.
Konsole is excellent. Wezterm is even better, and can pretty much do everything, everywhere.
There's no need to bother with the others if you like either of these.
I like Prompt.
I use Silverblue and a lot of Distrobox containers, which is why I enjoy it that much.
I discovered it through Bazzite.
Before that, I used Gnome Console or Black Box, because they're based on Libadwaita, good looking and very simple, which is enough for my needs.
If you can't give evidence, it's not nice to spread rumours
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!
I use Tilix, mostly because I'm used to it. I should probably upgrade to the plethora of new GTK4 terminal emulators, but I just can't be bothered. Plus none of them support tiling.
I've been using Alacritty (on Wayland) for the past few years. I like it's customizability. My only real complaint is that there are times when I really miss having scrollbars. After reading this thread I'll have to give kitty a try. I think I tried it a couple if years ago and was not impressed, but maybe it has gotten a lot better since then.
Kitty. Don't really care about the dev. I don't use software or not just because the devs are assholes, as long as they're not cannibals or pedos ofc. Even less so if it's FOSS.
I have been using Terminator for years now, because you can easily slice and dice the window into several terminals, and it is reasonably configurable. But then, as I am completely happy with it, I never ventured out to find an even better one, so YMMV.