So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
I don’t get the fixation people have with terminals. I don’t think I’ve ever used one in Linux that made me think “you know, I need to install a better terminal emulator”. So I just use what comes with my DE.
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Nowadays I don’t use the CLI much. But back in the day I used vim professionally and still didn’t care. Maybe because I ran everything from within vim?
I am on EndeavourOS and install packages via the command line and on top of that I primarily use Neovim, so I spend a decent amount of time in the terminal
I get that, but even when I worked as a coder using vim I didn’t care. What makes, let’s say, Gnome terminal a bad terminal?
There are two kinds of powerusers, and they DO NOT understand each other one bit.
The first, like you, just wants to get shit done and want to avoid the friction of choosing/installing/configuring their tools. GNOME, Chromium, and VSCode will do just fine.
The second, like me, wants to get shit done as well, but has a strong need for a very specific workflow. I’ll spend half an hour to get a toolchain working on nvim instead of using a pre-baked VSCode plugin. Not because VSCode is bad, but because I have a very (!) specific workflow and associated muscle memory and anything else distracts and unsettles me.
Some of the best engineers I know fall into either category, neither way is superior it’s just how brains are wired.
Anyway I use Kitty because it allows me to split tabs into windows (not windows into tabs! ew!), has low latency with high throughput thanks to GPU rendering, and a low memory footprint.
Oh that made a ton of sense! I don’t customize as much because I’m a completionist and would waste a whole week on it and not even change much from defaults anyway.
I also checked kitty and terminator and I can see the appeal. I’m used to opening separate windows and tile them using window manager commands to get a similar effect.
Thanks for your response, that was an eye opener!
I like customizing mine and switch DEs often, and use multiple across different devices. It’s easier to find one good terminal that can share a config and work well on each device and DE.
Alacritty is really nice and easy to configure, and isn’t “tied” to any desktop environment, like Konsole is. Kitty is really cool for its implementation of image display. Foot is a Wayland-native alternative that is also really nice to use.
+1 for kitty. Embedded images for Ranger is super cool. The only downside is i’ve been getting rendering issues for a couple seconds after waking up from suspend but that’s probably a configuration issue on my end
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I’m also on Gnome, but I use Konsole for the ‘Copy Input to Tab’ or ‘Copy Input to All Tabs in window.’ In my use case scenario, it’s super helpful to be able to type or paste a cmd once, and have it populate multiple tabs, or specific tabs in multiple windows. It does take a little tweaking to get it to obey the dark theme settings, but once upon a time I actually created a custom dark theme, just so I could use Konsole on Gnome. Things are much easier these days 😁 I’ll have to check out Tilix, I haven’t heard of it before, but that may be b/c I literally work by myself in the dank dark basement of the building…I don’t think the cleaning crew even knows that I’m down here
Foot but its limited for the averaged user. While it does support most standards its got no ui, configuration is done through a text editor and foots config file.
Personally I like it. Light weight and robust
Kitty is a great choice But I also enjoyed konsole for its SSH Alias’s
One feature foot is missing is ligatures. So if that is important to you, you’ll need to look for an alternative.
The dev of foot is an awesome person though, so that could offset the missing feature for some :-)
I am a boring person and use what my DE gives me by default. Konsole is very good and I also use Yakuake a lot but I will also take a closer look at Kitty.
I found Wezterm to be quite nice.
Same, nice to see it get some love. I’ve tried a whole bunch of them, Wez is also a super nice guy and very active on GitHub.
Kitty, hands down. GPU accelerated; native image protocol implemented by
ranger,neofetch, and more; incredibly customizable; multiplexing with multiple windows and tabs; ligature support; and much moreIf anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]
Honestly, Konsole is fantastic. On Gnome I use Blackbox, on Sway I use Foot, but if you’re on KDE you don’t really get better than Konsole.
Alacritty and Kitty are both terminals I used to use back when I was on i3wm, they’re perfectly usable, but I don’t think the average user will gain any tangible benefit from replacing Konsole.
I switched from Alacritty to Wezterm because I wanted ligature support and it’s also written in Rust. I really like it, though it had some issues with Wayland so I had to install a -git package but it’s fixed now. It also has a bunch of features I don’t use so I can’t really talk about those. I you don’t care about ligatures and the features, use Alacritty, it’s really good.
I’ve been using Terminator for years primarily because it’s portable. It predates a lot of the portable terminals in vogue right now. I haven’t really noticed a difference in using any of the newer ones so I haven’t switched. There’s some endowment effect there and sunk cost dotfiles.
If there’s a good comparison someone knows about that I should scope to understand what I’m missing I’m always curious!
Konsole kause i’m a kde konformist… kant kontrol it.
KDE user so I use Konsole. It’s great.
konsole is fast and reliableI like it
I just switched to wezterm and I’m really liking it so far. Takes some time to setup and tweak, but you can do almost anything. Works “everywhere“ too.
The only thing I’m missing so far is broadcast input.
Konsole is goated, legit really good.
Second to it would be Kitty in my opinion
yakuake also!
