I’ve always just used konsole or gnome terminal. Never really looked into what else is available. Tried cool-retro-term the other day, but the novelty wore off pretty fast for me.
Curious to see if there’s a terminal someone swears by and refuses to use anything else.
I use the broadcast, zoom, grouping, and the guake/yakuake style dropdown. Also it has layout switching like xmonad, ie you can ctrl + space to cycle pane layouts.
I tested kitty and alacrity when I first found out about advanced term emulators. I liked kitty more, but I don’t remember why. I use the kittens all the time. It’s super convenient to play a video or display an image in the terminal. Kitty works on most distros. I wish it worked on windows, too, so I could use it at work.
I was considering Foot, it is fast (renderwise and in interactive use) and the dev seems like an awesome person. But it doesn’t support ligatures. I’ll watch the issue and give it a shot when it’s implemented.
That’s fair. I don’t think I personally use ligatures anywhere and I’m not experiencing any issues with foot after using it for a few years so I might just have to stay blissfully ignorant on this one ;)
The only practical thing they provide for me is slightly better readability, and eye candy (my prompt rely on them). I like my shells functional and pretty 😁
I love the features of fish but the colors are hard to read on my terminal screen when there is blue text sometimes. Wish I could change the default colors of fiah
I used to install VS code for every new install and now I just stick to Kate. Although the storage impact is minimal, a lot of the dependencies for KDE apps are already present if you are running KDE as your desktop env.
Using alacritty for years on all linux devices, it does what its supposed to do. Recent change to toml configuration was a bit of hassle. But with the latest release the migration is no problem anymore.
Honestly didn’t even know they migrated to toml. I upgraded and it said yaml wasnt supported anymore. I used alacritty migrate and only had to remove a couple deprecated options and it was fine.
It’s why I keep it. It’s set and just seems to work well.
For those kitty users, have anyone been able to use fonts not in the list kitty support? I only use Terminus (OTB) fonts on terminal, and when trying kitty out, I found no way to get it to use Terminus (I could only select between those supported by kitty).
Kitty can’t use bitmap fonts because of how it draws to screen & bitmap fonts don’t scale. You would need a different terminal for bitmap fonts or choose a different font.
It looks like, though OTB (opentype bitmap fonts) are different than plain bitmap fonts, and are actually supported by pango. Alacritty allows me to use Terminus OTB fonts for example. There are other true type fonts which are also sort of my plan B, which are not supported by kitty either, as mentioned, I wanted to see if there’s a way not just to select between the list kitty offers, which is sort of limited. At any rate if not Terminus, I don’t really like much my plan B true type fonts much…
I moved to Iosevka (custom) a few years back after a) switching to Kitty & b) realizing my eyesight was getting worse so I needed a bigger font than what Terminus provides
Gnome Terminal. I’ve tried out a few others, but at this point I’m kind of partial to just using the default with good integration with the rest of the desktop. Pop, in this case. I’m curious if they’ll adopt something else for the terminal in COSMIC.
Edit: They just recently announced COSMIC Terminal, so that’s a yes. I look forward to trying it out. It’s based on alacritty’s framework.
Since you sound like you know what’s going on with Pop I’ll ask: what is Cosmic? I understand it’s a DE, but is it replacing Gnome entirely and a new DE built from the ground up? Seems like every update assumes you know more than I do :)
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m mostly talking out my ass. But as far as I know, it’s a new DE that’s being written in Rust using the iced toolkit. It looks like they’re aiming to be Wayland native without the X baggage. It’s been a while since the last full Pop release (20.04), so it will be nice to get the rest of the OS upgraded as well.
I am glad you are enjoying it so far! It has a bit of a learning curve, but it has improved significantly since I was first getting into it in high school around 2004. Wow… already 20 years.
Kitty for both X and Wayland - I like the customization (as in I already have the config file that I have backed up and can just plop it in), it works perfectly on any VM (used it on sway, hyprland, i3, awesomewm), though honestly I don’t see much of a difference between the terminal emulators. There’s literally no wrong choice or meaningful difference in my experience at least, but admittedly I just use a terminal emulator to run commands, neovim and system file editing.
Yeah same here, at some point I ended up settling on Kitty and now I’m used to it and there’s no reason to change, but pretty much any terminal emulator will do the job just fine.
So the “terminal” is the basic CLI that you use in the single-user, text-based mode. Terminal emulators are graphical programs that run in multi-user, graphics-based mode, and they hook into the terminal and allow you to access it inside graphical sessions. Some examples would be alacritty, kitty, urxvt, konsole, or terminator
Every “terminal app” is a terminal emulator, because non-emulated terminals are physical pieces of hardware.
So you are already using a terminal emulator, I’d guess Gnome Terminal, and it’s a fairly full featured modern terminal emulator (in my opinion at least).
That’s exactly what they are, but instead of connecting to a VAX at the other end of a modem they talk to a shell attached to a pseudo terminal device on the same machine.
A terminal is the thing that looks like it might be a computer, but nobody is home, it’s just connected to a modem. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, The Computer of your university.
A terminal emulator is, well, an emulator, so you can use a 1970’s shell, right there on your computer, just like you can emulate and play Pong or Space Invaders…
They are called emulators because “Terminal” used to mean a full-screen text interface to a mainframe. The functionality has carried on, which is why terminals behave pretty much the same on any platform. You don’t use your system’s regular text fields in a terminal emulator, for example.
st. It just works. I’m always opening and closing terminals, and 90% of the stuff I use have’s a TUI. st launches before I can even notice, under 4GB of RAM, and the entire install is less than a MiB.
I’ve been scrolling with no hope to see st anywhere but here it is! Only mentioned twice for now but this little guy deserves so much love. Yes, you have to build it (i.e. patch it) but that’s actually it’s beauty. You get the exact terminal you want, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re looking for power and lightweight this is your guy.
Coupled with tmux and you’re the God of your system :)
I keep a Gnome Shell instance always running with a Screen session. However, what I actually use to run CLI commands is Emacs Shell, built-in to Emacs.
Emacs Shell has most of the bells and whistles you get from things like Fish shell. So I like to use Dash, a minimal POSIX shell that is much lighter weight than Bash, Zsh, or Fish. Dash provides no features – no tab completion, no history, no line editing – and I have Emacs add all of those features on top of Dash for me. It is amazing what a good, scriptable terminal emulator can accomplish.
Emacs Shell can be scripted using the same scripting language it uses to script the editor, file browser, window manager, and everything else. So you can script the shell to search for regular expressions and make things clickable with the mouse, or only display portions of output, creating simple interactive views around shell commands. You can bind certain click buttons or keystrokes in the editor or file manager to run shell commands in new windows. You can script the shell with “expect”-like behavior (automatically input responses to certain prompts). You can capture and collate the output of multiple commands running in parallel.
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