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.
Konsole and xterm, although I haven’t had to use xterm in a while. Actually, circa 1997 I used kterm, the predecessor to konsole. ;)
Straight up Linux ttys are also quite common for me. Most old school distros still let you escape to the terminal, with CTRL-ALT-F1 or similar. I haven’t distro hopped in a long time, so I don’t know if other distros still do this.
I’ve always preferred Konsole because it handles several tabs pretty well and I keep a bunch open to my servers. The only issue I have with it is that it has a habit of detaching tabs if I click on one while my computer is running something heavy in the background.
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.
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 😁
Kitty the vast majority of the time but slowly using Ghostty more and more as it improves. Sometimes use Tabby and have been looking into Wave recently. I also use the x-terminal-reloaded package in the Pulsar editor for a dock terminal if im doing something in it at the same time.
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
Sakura. I recently did a little survey of what was on hand for Debian Stable, and that’s the one I liked best. The most important thing to me is right-click paste, because I do that incessantly.
Contour currently, but might consider that new one by the cosmic team. Contour is a bit minimalistic like alacritty or foot, yet it ligatures (a weird dealbreaker of mine). Goes well with zellij (pretty neat stuff, if u ask me, although breaking sixel is unfortunate, but they’re working on it).
Used to use kitty and weztetm, the latter was overall less confusing (generally faster, no need to use quirks for ssh). And then wezterm broke on Wayland :D
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