I’m looking for a new terminal. What’s your favorite one and why? Which one is popular?
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 moreIf anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]
what kind of benefit can i expect from a gpu accelerated terminal?
How often do you use images inside a terminal?
Why having a Gpu-accelarated terminal? The computational power used by the graphical rendering of a terminal is minimal…
I’ve been using it for a while now, and it is fine. But it is very often that I open htop and kitty is one of the big cpu wasters. Maybe I’ve configured something wrong? But yeah, sure, works.
terminal? i think you’ll find its a terminal emulator, haha! /s
i like kitty, its fast, simple, and supports ligatures.
I’ve always had problems with ssh on kitty.
Gotta use the ssh kitten
I know. I still had problems even when I used that. I don’t see why are there problems at all? Why doesn’t alacritty have the same problem?
I like Konsole.
It comes with KDE, supports tabs, themes, and loads very fast.
I don’t really need more from a terminal than that. When I, rarely, need more advanced features like window splitting and session management I also use Zellij (previously I used tmux).
When I, rarely, need more advanced features like window splitting and session management I also use Zellij
Konsole does window splitting as well, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does.
Konsole. It meets all my needs.
I just started using Konsole and so far it’s ticking all my boxes.
My favorite is Alacritty but I don’t use it because of stability issues lol. Kitty is popular now. It seems to have some questionable update policy but it’s fixable. It supports plugins (kittens), tabs and most of the common features. Though the configuration is done in a text file. It doesn’t have a GUI for it. For that I’d recommend Konsole
I agree that Konsole are Kitty are both lovely terminals that are very configurable. Kitty for
text file peoplevim enthusiasts and Konsole for GUI lovers.By “questionable update policy”, do you mean that it is updated by the package manager when installed from official repositories but it has an auto-updater functionality for users installing it manually?
IIRC someone who compiled from source but didn’t set the flag/config to disable the auto-updater was surprised about that.
I don’t see the big deal of it to be honest. The vast majority of users will be installing through the package manager. If you compile from source, you can decide yourself whether you want it to auto-update. The whole point of compiling from source is the extra control, not the defaults, I’d guess. Unless you don’t know what you are doing and the package was not available for your distro and in that case, enabling auto-update by default even serves that user group.
It’s more about the fact that the Kitty’s developer rudely and aggressively refused to disable automatic updates after a ton of requests. Some people just don’t use certain software if they don’t like the developer
I like kitty, but it’s configuration system is completely nuts.
Alacritty was good, but had weird issues with fonts for me.
I ended up on Wezterm. Lots of modern features, performance, stability, and awesome configurability.
What stability issues have you encountered?
I can’t remember all of them but now I have a weird issue that when I open Alacritty there’s some loading going on in the background for quite a few seconds which I can even see on the cursor (I think it’s “xdg” that’s loading) and even reinstalling the system didn’t help
Oh I think I know what you mean. Did you try setting your shell to something like
shinstead of bash or zsh and see if it was a shell startup issue?sh is just an alias for the default shell. And also idk how to set that
And your default shell is a POSIX compliant shell, usually dash or ash, so that’s what I mean by
sh. You can set it in~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.tomlwith:[shell] program = "/bin/sh"Just tried that. Didn’t help
Most things in Linux are configured via text files. It’s one of the main principles of Linux; store configs in plain text files. Saves us from having to use awful tooling like that of the windows registry. Even most GUI config settings are just manipulating a text file under the hood.
Some people just like GUI more
Well yeah. But would you rather a GUI that stores the settings in easy to read and manipulate plain text files; Linux, or an archaic GUI that manipulates raw data and often breaks and is hard to understand; Windows registry.
Even if you prefer GUIs, you’d probably still want the data stored in plain text files for the sake of simplicity and consistency.
Konsole. Never had the need to explore alternatives.
People out here talking about graphics card accelerated terminals as if they’re able to read text that scrolls by on a non-accelerated terminal.
Konsole fulfills all my needs except synchronised splits. For that, I still use
tmux.Please stop adding licences.
I would appreciate it if you did.
I’d just block
I like kitty because:
- multiplexing
- more minimal than DE terminals
- fast
- can display images natively
How often do you use the image display within a terminal?
Kitty is not “minimal” at all, it’s full of superfluous features… I used it for many years and I loved it, but I wouldn’t say it’s “minimal”
I look at images a lot, don’t use a real image viewer much
Mmm yes so fast and feature rich
ST - Simple terminal https://st.suckless.org/
Because I agree with suckless philosophy.
Can’t argue with that, minimalism is based. (I say this as a non-minimalist)
I want to love it too. I use dwm, and tried ST for a year, but I gave up. Tmux doesn’t solve every issue, and specially when you have to manage another Tmux session on a server, it gets ridiculous.
I want to use as much suckless as possible, but ST just doesn’t work for me.
This one.
You’re so funny man
Wezterm is my favourite because it’s really configurable and supports ligatures. Konsole is also quite nice. Generally I’m in favour of using whichever one comes with your DE, or Wezterm if you use a WM.
Kitty is probably the most popular one, but I don’t like it cause
no ligature supportno accelerationit claims it has good font management, but fonts never worked properly in my experience.Alacritty and Foot are also popular for their performance. Alacritty does have some stability issues though.
Kitty does use GPU acceleration
Wezterm is my daily driver.
Well I’ll throw in my endorsement for kitty. I like the ligature support, the fact that it can be configured to hide all UI, and it uses text files for configuration that I can put in my dot files repo.
There are some particular features that I use constantly:
I can yank a file path to the prompt from previous output by pressing ctrl+shift+p then f then a 1-character label. I can do the same with a git hash (or other hash) by pressing h instead of f.
I can scroll back and search previous output using only the keyboard with ctrl+shift+h which puts the terminal history in a pager.
I can get the output of only the previous command in a pager with ctrl+shift+g. Or jump to previous prompts with ctrl+shift+x and ctrl+shift+z.
I use kitty-scrollback.nvim which replaces that pager with neovim so I can use all of my editor features to search history, copy what I want, etc.
I use foot because it’s wayland native and the developer is a very nice person. Only thing missing from it for me is ligature support.
A close second for me is WezTerm. It is very full featured, although I do not use a lot of its features. Developer is also extremely nice and helpful. It does have ligature support.
I personally use tiling window managers, so I have no need for built-in tiling / tabbing features.
Alacritty because it’s a minimal black rectangle, perfect for using with a tiling WM
foot is also a good choice for a minimal terminal emulator.
You forgot to mention it’s wayland only. This was disappointing, it looks like it’s got some nice features…
Yeah I mean there’s a lot of benefits and increased security on Wayland now so it’s definitely worth the transition to.
- i’m on xfce so i’d need to change my de
- swhkd seems to be abandoned, and i couldn’t get it to run, so i’d need to change a lot about my wm setup on top of moving to sway
- nvidia issues
- permission issues (screen sharing for example)
- i’d also need to replace other tools, shortcuts, etc. so they use the wayland alternatives
Definitely not worth it just to get fractional scaling, and some theoretical security improvements on an OS that’s already quite secure. I tried using it for a few weeks on KDE, and I had to go back to x11 for something almost every day.
Weird, I’ve not required X for anything since I started using it, I also just use my Window Manager to bind hotkeys (usually Sway)
I prefer to use sxhkd for all shortcuts except for starting the terminal, and some wm specific commands. It allows me to keep a really short wm config, and have an easier time trying out new ones.
Xterm
Ah, I See You’re a Man of Culture As Well.
XFCE-Terminal. Small, lightweight, Wayland if you use it and plenty of config without cryptic dotfiles.
Plus popularity due to it being the XFCE default and contributed towards by the XFCE team.
