I just use konsole , which is the default terminal emulator for KDE. I don't need anything fancy, just something basic to run commands, updates, a few scripts, etc.
konsole is low-key a great terminal. It's really snappy, supports ligatures, and looks good. It's one of my favorite KDE applications and the one I miss most when it's not available.
Same. I do have gnome on my laptop and the terminal was lacking relative to my KDE desktop, so I ended up making the switch there too
alacritty
cool-retro-term 😎 to live in retro cyberpunk dreamland
Wow that is actually way cooler than the original terminals. Thx!
I primarily use Alacritty. I spend quite a lot of time running things that produce ludicrous amounts of output (eg. compiling Android from source). Out of 10 or so terminal emulators I've tested earlier this year, it was the only one that didn't use 100% CPU displaying all that output, staying in the low single digits.
I'd prefer to use Wezterm because I like its lua configuration system and the builtin pane splitting, but with my workload, I still run into issues where its CPU usage shoots to 100% and becomes non-responsive for a while. (That said, it's already a lot better than before. I try to report any issues I can reliably reproduce and Wez has been wonderful about fixing them.)
It really does not make sense a terminal consuming 100% CPU, so Alacrittycis my choice as well
I use foot together with foot-server. The client opens in less than a millisecond, and I usually have tens of terminal windows open at the same time. Tabbing comes from the window manager.
I ike konsole
Gnome terminal. I don't really care the terminal emulator. What's in the terminal is what's important. The terminal window just needs to be able to resize correctly though.
When I'm using a tiling window manager, I use kitty, because I like its speed and support for font ligatures. When I'm using a Desktop Environment like Gnome or KDE I usually don't use the terminal at all, but if I need it, I use the default emulator.
I like my kitty
Personally I've been using gnome-terminal for quite a while and was fairly happy except that I needed to maintain gnome-terminal and libvte patches to get notification support. Having some sort of notification when a long-running command completes is very important to my productivity.
I've been using Konsole but not fully happy.
I've been looking at other options but none-of them feel quite right.
Alacritty:
Kitty:
Wezterm:
Terminator:
I realize that I am probably going to have to make a compromise (probably just go back to gnome-terminal with patches) but I figured it would be interesting to see what everyone else was using and make sure I didn't miss something.
To me the important features are:
I'm pretty sure you can set alacritty and kitty to a ridiculously high number of scrollback lines, like at least several trillion. I think I just add 4 zeros on to the default and I've never had enough output for it to run out of scrollback. At some point you're going to run out of ram or storage for storing scrollback so you can't realistically have unlimited scrollback without doing something ridiculous.
I use wezterm, but there are many good ones
Anything, but with tmux running inside. You can copy text even in a tty, split the terminal window, detach from and attach to tmux sessions, etc. I will never use a terminal for any moderately complex task without tmux again :)
I use Kitty, because it works well on both X and Wayland, and is GPU accelerated. For some reason, Alacritty doesn't display the fonts properly (Displays them much smaller on Wayland. Only program I have such issues with)
Also Kitty is more widely packaged (for example on Debian based distros)
urxvt. It works good enough and doesn't use much memory.
This is what i use as well.
I almost exclusively use Yakuake nowadays. I like the drop down terminal.
Guake is awesome too
foot is great. Simple, fast, and customisable enough for my needs.
Alacritty is great, but I switched to wezterm due to ligatures support
Yakuake, I can't use anything other than a quake based terminal. Because of my work I need 24/7 quick access to a terminal, yakuake is just that
Kitty has awesome framerates, easily hitting 90fps pushing 150k - 180k per frame. Alacrity is also dope.
Alacritty for me
I'm using foot since I've installed sway and it's just fine ..not a super user to evaluate well
st is good enough for my needs. I use tmux for multiplexing, scrollback, and tabs
TMUX is life. Before, I was fighting screen to do what I needed. TMUX just does it and the customisation puts it way above. I can't imagine working on the command line without TMUX.
kitty
Terminator is the one I've been using for a while
Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as "A high-end terminal for low-end systems".
Kitty with catppuccin and 50%-ish transparency. Works like a charm. And also if you add something like what kitti3 does (look it up on github), will be even better.
Anything that supports solarized dark and solarized light theming. It is so much less eyestrain
Tilix
I recommend black box. https://flathub.org/apps/com.raggesilver.BlackBox it is the nicest and most intergrated terminal on gnome and I use it daily and have zero issues
While y'all here:
is there a terminal emulator that has "modern" text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z...
Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character..
“modern” text entry controls... Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del ...
Those are not really features of the terminal emulator but of the shell. I don't think a terminal emulator can coerce bash or zsh or whatever to do those things unless it acts as some kind of proxy between your text editing buffer and the shell, which would probably lead to its own set of complications. The thing you want would have to be a combination of a GUI terminal program and its own shell.
For bash, I suggest you read up on readline keyboard shortcuts, which can do many of the text editing tricks that you are asking. The shortcuts are different than what you are used to on Windows, and there's no concept of "selecting" text, but for terminal applications it's pretty much the standard way text input is handled on Linux.
I know that zsh has the option to use vim-like keybindings if you're familiar with those.
alacritty. the only downside for me is no ligatures
Whatever gets me connected to my tmux session over ssh
Wezterm, which does everything, with a great developer behind it.
Second choice is Konsole: super solid and great rendering.
Aaand tmux with either of those.
Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.
St with few patches and personal customizations is amazing.
I love wezterm, primarily because it is cross platform. The most important factor to me is being able to use the same one on Windows, Mac and Linux, because I use all three on a regular basis and don't want to maintain multiple configs. However, wezterm currently has a bug that prevents it from opening on Wayland+Nvidia which forces me to use something else on Linux. None of the other ones get close imo.
Yakuake. I've been using it for more than a decade and love it.
xfce4-terminal has transparency and warns when I'm about to paste multiple lines to it.
I rather enjoy Tilix. It can tile a single tab without tmux and it can also give special handling to links matched from regexps. I use it to go from Python stacktraces to correct line in Emacs with just a click. It can also do Quake-like terminal, which I use alot.
The project is looking for maintainers, though, so it's possible at some point I need to start looking for alternatives..
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