I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I’m curious what the good options are for terminals. I’ve skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they’re too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I’m aware that there’s not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I’m curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?
Personally I’ve just been using konsole since it’s what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I’m missing out on features I don’t even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.
Linux vtty forever! Can’t cat data into the framebuffer when your desktop is getting in the way!!
Jk I use gnome terminal for everything, or whatever default is available. It’s quite amazing that most of them handle all but the most niche terminal features these days.
When I need to install a terminal emulator for some reason I always go for urxvt… but it is pretty terrible (it’s a great vt but mouse interaction is clunky and graphics are old school) compared to pretty much everything else.
I have determined that foot is best for me personally, like alacritty and a couple others, it is very barebones. No tabs or anything like that without tmux. But it doesn’t rely on GPU acceleration and is just as fast (or faster) than my experience using GPU accelerated terminals. Easy to configure and since it doesn’t have the GPU requirements it works on old hardware like a dream. Only possible issue is that it is wayland only but since that is all I like to use it is perfect.
I find a lot like ghostty and wezterm try to include too many features. All I need a terminal emulator to be is a terminal emulator. But then a lot of these then add tabs, build in multiplexers & more and it is more bloated than I like a simple utility to be. Additionally, I don’t need native tabs as a lot I do in the terminal uses SSH so it is easier just to use tmux/zilji and not have to manage it as much.
Anything is fine unless you’re using the terminal very heavily. Almost all of my workflow is within the terminal so I want everything to be as fast as possible. I want a minimal, low config, fast terminal that has the exact same behavior when using the same config on Linux and MacOS (I know, fuck me, I have to use it for work). And those are Alacritty and Ghostty. I hate Alacritty’s horrible icon so I use Ghostty.
Surprised that there’s so few drop-down terminals being mentioned; I use Tilda but I guess they are all fine as long as they work on one’s distro config. It’s so handy to always have the console locked and loaded invisibly, but toggled by the press of a button.
…weird. I don’t understand why drop-down terminals are a thing? I can bring up Konsole with a hotkey too, only it just opens a window instead fo doing a fancy animation. That’s such a tiny part of its functionality that I can’t imagine how ‘drop-down’ became a descriptor for a terminal instead of just a bullet point on a feature list somewhere, much less a whole-ass category of terminals, lol.
But, fair enough.
If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn’t have all that fancy stuff that I don’t need (and that takes up cpu cycles).
I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don’t know about.
The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you’re a serious terminal user.
One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such
I think that’s a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don’t understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.
Fair, I’m definitely not a ‘serious’ terminal user.
Yeah I was wondering about that, it’d be nice to have an LLM that’s specifically trained on like linux system configs and shit, but that’s well beyond the scope of my capabilities, so if it doesn’t already exist I’m just SOL on that one.
Yeah I mean even if it was trained specifically for that, they often will still be incorrect because they don’t actually understand the concepts they’re presenting.
Wezterm has been my daily for years. Has enough extras to let any crazy terminal app work as intended but doesn’t try to do too much.
I used urxvt on my last install, but now I’m using Kitty because urxvt on Debian isn’t compiled with true colour and I didn’t want to install from source.
I like Tilix
+1 for Tilix, iirc there is some back end adjustment you have to make for full use of its features, but its easy to apply and has a link to run you though it. Once that’s done, it’s really customizeable and can look great.
Ghostty 👻
What’s so great about Ghostty?
I recently tried out some terminals but in the end it didn’t really make all that big of a difference, maybe because I use tmux so I don’t need split functionality. For a long time I used Gnome Console because it came with my distro but then I tried Ghostty because some people said it was the best and I also thought I was missing out. However for me it was mostly the same as before and it was cool in a way but for some reason it didn’t really click. Now I am using Wezterm because other people said it’s the best and what i like is that it comes as a flatpak and it is configured using Lua. But I could just go back to Gnome Console if I had to.
Yeah I’m kinda getting that impression. Most of the responses to this post have generally been ‘use what your DE ships with’ or ‘I use something obscure and tailored to this weird specific use case I have’. I’ve looked at a lot of the suggestions people have given and none of them seem like they would be a noticeable upgrade for me, so I’m content to continue using konsole until I come across a situation that requires me to do something fancy that it can’t do.
I’m using Kitty. Kitten ssh is smooth as I ssh into other machines a lot. I also love being able to split the screen and have tabs. I use Kitty session a lot, I have a pre-configured yaml file that just sets up the terminal for me. I like the keyboard shortcuts too.
Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)
xfce4-terminal, in wayland+niri too. Because alternatives are always missing some features or are too bloated.
Do you use any of the other XFCE stuff with Niri? Or just the terminal?
Not yet. Panel autohide is bound to the WM (notebook display is small enough already), which doesn’t work with niri. Currently fiddling with Waybar. I just need a task manager, tray and clock + battery.
