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.
Termius because somehow I glitched the free trial for like 8 months and love having all the hosts saved and synced across devices. The android app is pretty damn slick. Can save frequent commands and has a password clipboard thing, probably not the right way to describe it. That said, if I’m just opening a local sesh on my Pop!_OS desktop I use the bundled one for that.
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.
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.
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.
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