best linux terminal emulator

Am I the only one that’s fine with whatever the OS provides out of the box? Like, as long as I can turn the bell off and change the font, I’m chillin, and I have yet to run into a terminal that doesn’t provide those options.

Curious to hear what drives people to seek out other options (besides tiling, that I understand, I’m a tabs guy myself tho)

What's wrong with kitty?

I've been using kitty for some time didn't had any issues, and multiplexing is useful.

PS: i used tmux for many years, and still use on headless

For me: Wezterm. It does pretty much everything. I don't think Alacritty/Kitty etc. offer anything over it for my usage, and the developer is a pleasure to engage with.

Second place is Konsole -- it does a lot, is easy to configure, and obviously integrates nicely with KDE apps.

Honorable mention is Extraterm, which has been working on cool features for a long time, and is now Qt based.

People keep recommending terminal emulators, but I think they're missing your point.

I'm not aware of anyone making new terminals these days. In my opinion DIGITAL is still king. They are getting a bit hard to come by. VT220 used to be the gold standard, but a VT420 or VT520 is still worth it if you can find one.

Looks like there are a few VT420s on eBay going for up to $200. Prices aren't what they used to be.

There is no one-size-fits-all, but for fits most, you're looking at KDE's Konsole or GNOME's new Terminal (formerly Ptyxis). Everything else is going to be niche, with special use cases. What are your specific needs?

Konsole is awesome and has great integration with Plasma ofc. I'm surprised to see it barely mentioned.

The one with your distro shipped with

Alacritty. Alacritty. Alacritty. And did I mention Alacritty? (I'm just counting how many I have open atm)

Depends on what you need actually. I was doing fine with urxvt on Xorg, so foot is a perfect alternative for me on Wayland.

Wezterm is my primary. Love the built-in domain/sshmux features, especially for work. The LUA config rocks, sky is the limit. Highly portable when using something like Chezmoi or YADM.

That said, it's not always the most performant, especially with certain TUIs. I've been running my NVim workspace in Kitty lately just to avoid the minor UI lag (primarily with lazygit). Not a fan of Kitty (or its dev) otherwise, but it serves its purpose.

If Wezterm ever gets optimized, it'll be the GOAT for me.

Ghostty also sounds like it's got potential, but haven't gotten my invite yet. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I use whatever with zsh and oh my zsh

A Windows VM running Windows terminal, SSH'd back into the host, obviously.

Honestly I stick with whatever the default is and never had a problem that led me to find anything else.

Alacritty is fine. If you're not combining it with tmux and zsh/fish, id pluck those fruits first.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis

Ptyxis is my current go-to. It can detect available pods or toolboxes (maybe docker too haven't tested it) and you can open terminals directly into them. It also highlights ssh terms and root shells differently.

There are a huge number of built-in color schemes as well and I've had no trouble finding any configuration option I've found myself wanting to look for.

It's also available on flathub so it's easily installed in most distros.

Tilda because you can roll it down from the top of your screen with one key press.

I use the one that comes with my DE, but if I am using a WM I use kitty

Terminator for me. It has tiles and tabs and does everything I need.

I don't know if it's the best, but kitty + zsh has been my daily driver for many years.

foot for me

I usually just get by with Alacritty and Zellij, pairs pretty well together.

Running Kitty the past year and a bit and really like it. Used to run into weird laggy issues with other terminal emulators, but Kitty runs like a beast for me.

kitty with fish

Foot with tmux is my goto.

I'm somewhere between Kitty and Ptyxis.

Not a new project, but I feel is often overlooked: Sakura. I’ve fallen back to it repeatedly over the years. It is lightweight, opinionated but sane. Not as brutalist as st. I combo it with Tmux using powerline with little tweaking.

It uses standard libraries and stays out of the way.

Switched from kitty to foot, I like it.

Alacrity or foot (foot has less features but it's faster)

Cosmic term is nice. Still just alpha, so there are rough edges though.

It's between konsole and kitty for me. Both are great.

Tilix is great, complete for my needs.

st on Xorg and foot on Wayland

I've always been happiest with xfce4-terminal, though I'm using Konsole currently until XFCE fully supports Wayland.

Way back when, I was more than happy with rxvt.

I've been using xterm, urxvt, and st. Also tested alacrity, kitty, and wezterm. Your shell also plays a critical role in your terminal usage (but I won't deviate here).
For my use-case, the latter are overkill so I stayed with st. The only missing feature for me was image support even though I use it sporadically. To cover that I use a script that relies on ueberzug or ucollage if I need to browse folders.

I've wrote a small post about ucollage if you're interested.

Surprised nobody mentioned Yakuake. Just discovered it's just for kde. Been using it for years. It hides at the top of my screen and slides down when the cursor hits the top. Full desktop when not used and can access it no matter which app I'm using.

Foot is the best

Good, updated article: https://itsfoss.com/linux-terminal-emulators/

http://contour-terminal.org/

ghostty looks promising, but it's in "closed beta" for now. When it's released, it will be public and open source. :)

Foot because it's sway default. It's also configurable, has shortcuts and sixel support.

I run multiple terminal apps. I thought I would try a few, and I never deleted any of them.

I consider st a great choice when using i3 or dwm. Customizing it takes time, but RAM usage is what I usually check and in case of st it is comically small.

Xterm for me. As others have shown there are other ones that are newer than that but Xterm has become my favorite.

all of the fancy features that other terminals provide, I get with Tmux, so any emulator for me. I like transparent themes and that's easy to set up in Alacritty, so that's what I usually get