this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Like the question above am I just an old man that's not keeping up with the times or is terminator still a great terminal to use in 2025?

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 days ago (5 children)

I just use konsole. It comes with plasma and is more than good enough for me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

Ditto, this and Yakuake, which is great at keeping it out of the way until I need it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Konsole is great! Only complaint I have is its too complicated to change the text color scheme. But I'll manage. Still beats everything else I've tried.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

Same, it just works.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Yes, Team Konsole!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Yup, Konsole is good enough.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I chose Kitty cause of the name and I have never looked at anything else.

[–] lemon 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Another happy Kitty user here!

I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.

Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.

Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.

I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I must be older and even more out of touch than you are, as I only use the default Terminal that came with my distro and I had to do a search to check what were Ghostty and Terminator (I know about the movie, obviously, but I'm also old enough to have been watching it in theatre the year it was first released ;)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago

I’m like a generation younger than you at least and I’m on the default terminal and tmux train, so I’m saying you’re not out of touch.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'm an old man. I don't get the appeal of a terminal with hardware acceleration and all that fancy stuff. I use what the distro/DE came with.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I am with you. xfce4-terminal in drop down mode is all I need!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Xfce4-terminal has the quake style drop down mode?

(rushes off to try it)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Exactly. You invoke it with xfce4-terminal --drop-down

If you set that as a shortcut in xfce, the first call will start it and recurring calls will show the running instance.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 days ago

I'd like to think there's a difference between "keeping up with the times" and chasing whatever new thing gets advertised.

Unless you're really into number chasing with benchmarks then just keep using whatever you like until something YOU find better comes along.

Also I'm GenZ and just use whatever comes with the DE, it's not an old person thing shakes fist.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Use whatever you like. You know your needs better than anybody else. As for me, I like Konsole and I will stick to that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I use yakuake (or guake if I still used gnome), I love having a consitent terminal slide down the screen every time I press a shortcut, especially if it's supplememtary to what I'm doing in the graphical shell.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

I switched from terminator to alacritty a while back. Moved to kitty a few months until a bug was fixed. I do try out new terminals occasionally, but nothing feels as nice as alacritty to me so i stay.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Multiple GNOME terminals in one window!

Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.

terminator sounds great. never heard of it. i did try ghostty, but i can't help myself opening xfce terminal. muscle memory.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Yeah it's great I have a hot key super + Enter to open terminator so the mussle memory doesn't change if I change terminals

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Hmm you interested me

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

I have never heard of terminator.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

A terminal is a terminal. If there is a feature you don't know you need then you don't need it. Run with whatever you have

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

If there is a feature you don't know you need then you don't need it.

That makes no sense. By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don't -need- cars. There are of course thing "you don't know about" but would totally use if you were introduced to them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure someone thought

Man it would be nice if horses were faster

I'd say the same is true for terminal emulators.

It would be neat if I could use tabs

Or

I wish there were better ways to render things to the terminal

At the end of the day it's a black box where you can type commands. If thats all you need than you need anything else.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I'm no connoisseur, but I just want the same feel as I had back in the 90s. No terminal emulator, straight up tty with crisp VGA ROM fonts at some hacky SuperVGA resolution. Before the virtual framebuffer that basically every computer today uses for tty.

Konsole, gnome-terminal and ghostty can all be made to feel right to me. I'm giving ghostty a spin, and I like how it supports custom shaders so I can make it feel even more like home.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

Eh, why would you? They're fancy looking but if what you use works for you that's about it.

[–] francoperdu 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

"Am I just an old man..."

-Lord Nikon

I definitely am not getting old, nor am I Zero Cool

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Lol zerocool is around here too. I have him tagged it's always fun when we meet in a thread.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What's its advantages over Terminator? Does it have any?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

GPU-accelerated, likely faster and less mem usage (Python vs Zig), and image rendering.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Is there a reason to change? I use foot terminal, have also used Alacritty and Kitty previously.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

I loved terminator but after learning tmux I just don't really see much point in the main feature. I use xfce4-terminal on i3 these days.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I've used GNOME Terminal since 2005.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I think gnome-console is the new default. At first, I was sceptical and stayed on gnome-terminal, but now gnome-console seems stable, fast and simple to replace it for me.

I have used other terminal emulators with different DEs, though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The main advantages I have felt with fancy terminals are

  • GPU accelerated means scrolling feels smoother
  • Nice single configuration file for the terminal which I can easily move around
  • Launches slightly faster. Only noticeable when you are launching multiple terminals
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

I have switched from XTerm to Konsole only a year ago.

[–] omgitsaheadcrab 5 points 5 days ago

I used terminator until a couple of weeks ago when I moved from i3 to hyprland. Now I use kitty 🤷🏼‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I use foot which is Wayland aware and renders Unicode fonts. Honestly I don't need much from the terminal itself as I'm usually in tmux to deal with all the "tabs" and scrollback.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Terminator isn't supported anymore as far as I remember. A good substitution for it is Tilix. I'd been using the latter for a while but recently I switched to the new default terminal in Fedora (it had weird name that I unable to remember) and Tilling Shell extension for Gnome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Tilix is great but also unmaintained.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Maintainers wanted. At least it's not completely dead...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

From a look at the documentation it’s just a fancy terminal. If you don’t really care about theming or image rendering then it’s not something you need. If you’re trying to rice a UI like hyprland then it looks like a good option.

Personally, I don’t see much added value over whatever the default terminal is but I’ve never been one to mess with things that do what they are supposed to.

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