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.
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.
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.
I’m using the ddterm gnome extension, and it’s been the best I’ve tried so far. Lots of customization, very few bugs, and does exactly what you need it to with no bells or whistles to distract you.
Kitty, although I was using Alacritty until last week. I got an update that had a bug related to launching Alacritty full screen. I’m in a terminal all day so I couldn’t be bothered with it. I installed kitty and adapted my configuration pretty easily. I can’t tell the difference between them except for the icon.
There are a small number of terminal emulators I would be happy to use as daily drivers and most of them have been named here but my default is kitty. It supports everything I need and a lot I don’t and doesn’t have any showstoppers. All the modern terminal implementations are performant enough. I used real terminals like vt-100s and vt-220s. Everything we have today is awesome by comparison. We fetishize performance and features too much. Once you have something that works there isn’t much reason to change IMO.
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.
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