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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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’ve really grown to like yakuake. I always have a sorta “main terminal” where I have a tmux session going and now I do that in yakuake so it’s available on all desktops and easily put “out of the way” when I don’t need it.
Add comment