I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I’m curious what the good options are for terminals. I’ve skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they’re too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I’m aware that there’s not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I’m curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?
Personally I’ve just been using konsole since it’s what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I’m missing out on features I don’t even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.
The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you’re a serious terminal user.
One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such
I think that’s a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don’t understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.
Fair, I’m definitely not a ‘serious’ terminal user.
Yeah I was wondering about that, it’d be nice to have an LLM that’s specifically trained on like linux system configs and shit, but that’s well beyond the scope of my capabilities, so if it doesn’t already exist I’m just SOL on that one.
Yeah I mean even if it was trained specifically for that, they often will still be incorrect because they don’t actually understand the concepts they’re presenting.
Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)
I agree. I think OP should try another shell first. That will impulse the use of the terminal. I’m using alacritty because it stuck and the updates are minuscule, but I’ve recently moved to fish and have it on desktop and server.
Konsole, because it fits in nicely with Plasma (as you would expect) and does everything I need a terminal to do.
I’m fond of guake. Single button shortcut, dropdown terminal inspired by the Quake console. I’m just a guy who ditched windows, by no means a power user.
Are you serious? It’s just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I’m mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don’t need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can’t imagine what other features may I need.
GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.
What do you want to accelerate? And for what you need more than 256 colors?
If you’re on a high-refresh display, the GPU acceleration allows for much faster updates. Makes it feel much smoother. It’s of course not needed, but neither is a lot of stuff we do.
This is a literal box with text on your screen, what do you mean by “smoother”?
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Umm, what I said: the updates happen faster. If you have a GPU maybe you should try it?
That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.
The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?
Yeah I have been, I’ve just seen discussion about terminals that do all kinds of fancy shit and I’m wondering if I’m missing out on features by using the default (konsole), though it seems fairly full-featured. shrug
I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don’t know about.
Alacritty, one of the first rust based terminals. Fast, simple config. Had no problems. Foot as a second if you want an alternative.
Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.
Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I’d install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I’ll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.
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I like guake, or yakuake… they are inspired by the console in Quake. F9 drops it down and hides it. Works for what i need it to. I’m just a guy who recently ditched windows, not a power user.
Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.
I concur it just works good choice
I love foot. The only caveat is that it’s only for Wayland (no X support).
I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don’t need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn’t have this really handy theme switching feature.
That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (
term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn’t as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.Ghostty 👻
What’s so great about Ghostty?
I like Tilix
+1 for Tilix, iirc there is some back end adjustment you have to make for full use of its features, but its easy to apply and has a link to run you though it. Once that’s done, it’s really customizeable and can look great.
If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn’t have all that fancy stuff that I don’t need (and that takes up cpu cycles).
