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177 comments

  • My favorite is Alacritty but I don't use it because of stability issues lol. Kitty is popular now. It seems to have some questionable update policy but it's fixable. It supports plugins (kittens), tabs and most of the common features. Though the configuration is done in a text file. It doesn't have a GUI for it. For that I'd recommend Konsole

    • Most things in Linux are configured via text files. It's one of the main principles of Linux; store configs in plain text files. Saves us from having to use awful tooling like that of the windows registry. Even most GUI config settings are just manipulating a text file under the hood.

    • I agree that Konsole are Kitty are both lovely terminals that are very configurable. Kitty for text file people vim enthusiasts and Konsole for GUI lovers.

      By "questionable update policy", do you mean that it is updated by the package manager when installed from official repositories but it has an auto-updater functionality for users installing it manually?

      IIRC someone who compiled from source but didn't set the flag/config to disable the auto-updater was surprised about that.

      I don't see the big deal of it to be honest. The vast majority of users will be installing through the package manager. If you compile from source, you can decide yourself whether you want it to auto-update. The whole point of compiling from source is the extra control, not the defaults, I'd guess. Unless you don't know what you are doing and the package was not available for your distro and in that case, enabling auto-update by default even serves that user group.

      • It's more about the fact that the Kitty's developer rudely and aggressively refused to disable automatic updates after a ton of requests. Some people just don't use certain software if they don't like the developer

    • What stability issues have you encountered?

      • I can't remember all of them but now I have a weird issue that when I open Alacritty there's some loading going on in the background for quite a few seconds which I can even see on the cursor (I think it's "xdg" that's loading) and even reinstalling the system didn't help

    • I like kitty, but it's configuration system is completely nuts.

      Alacritty was good, but had weird issues with fonts for me.

      I ended up on Wezterm. Lots of modern features, performance, stability, and awesome configurability.

  • Well I'll throw in my endorsement for kitty. I like the ligature support, the fact that it can be configured to hide all UI, and it uses text files for configuration that I can put in my dot files repo.

    There are some particular features that I use constantly:

    I can yank a file path to the prompt from previous output by pressing ctrl+shift+p then f then a 1-character label. I can do the same with a git hash (or other hash) by pressing h instead of f.

    I can scroll back and search previous output using only the keyboard with ctrl+shift+h which puts the terminal history in a pager.

    I can get the output of only the previous command in a pager with ctrl+shift+g. Or jump to previous prompts with ctrl+shift+x and ctrl+shift+z.

    I use kitty-scrollback.nvim which replaces that pager with neovim so I can use all of my editor features to search history, copy what I want, etc.

  • Once upon a time, I loved Xfce Terminal. It use light and complete for the use-case I had. Then I wanted something that looked nicer with vin. So I started looking for an alternative.

    I used alacrity for a long time (4 years). Then, I found kitty provided some nice stuffs that simplified the workflow for remote servers thanks to special ssh commands and session tabs. I used kitty for about 2-3 years. One thing I missed was that it's hard to integrate with other software because it implementa all it's crazy "kitty protocols" and pretend to use them even if they're compleynon-standard.

    Recently, some misterious bug appeared and made it impossible to use. I switched to wezterm. I liked it could be configured in Lua, so it feels more coherent with my neovim configs. I just missed the mappings for switching terminal and send "!!

    <enter>

    " (i.e. execute last command). The special commands for copying custom configs on any ssh server was also missing, but it's easy to make a script for that. I haven't experienced too much with integrating it with other tools, but I suspect it's not better than kitty in this.

    I gave a chance to konsole last week. I just asked myself why we (neovim users) all look for Gpu-accelarated stuffs. The improvement in performance is negligible actually. However, konsole is super-well integrated in the OS, with a scratch terminal (yakuake), file managers (dolphin, konqueror), text editors (Kate), and even simple browsers (konqueror). It provides all the features of wezterm. I still lack a key map for sending "!!

    <enter>

    " to a specific terminal, though. But I think the integration it offers is superior to that niche feature (that can be paired within neovim, btw).

  • I like Terminator for its mouse-controlled multiplexing. I also like the fact that it's made with Python, although I haven't utilized this fact in practice.

  • I use ddterm. It's a gnome extension that adds a Drop Down Terminal. I quite like how easy it is to bring it up and hide it again, at the press of a button. You can even hide it without closing it, so it's great for testing web apps.

  • 9term is what I use the most. Once you get used to the Plan9 way, you kind of like it. Sometimes I use Terminator as well. Konsole is like Terminator, both are good. They are both nicer than kitty for me. I tried kitty, went back to Terminator as it has menus to edit things, not just a text file.

    • How is plan9 compared to BSd & Linux? I only learned about it recently.

      What are the stand out pros & cons compared to Linux & BSD?

  • I like Tilix, since it lets me split the terminal with a keyboard shortcut and easily switch between terminals too. I tried using GNOME terminal + tmux, but having to hit Ctrl+b before the command I wanted got tedious fast.

    • Yay, there's another Tilix user out there! Been a fan for a while and the tiling is great!

  • None, they all have pros & cons.
    \ The most popular in the Linux space is probably Alacritty & Kitty.

  • What's my favourite terminal? The one that fits my desktop environment. When I used XFCE I used its terminal, when I used i3 I used kitty, and now I use blackbox on Gnome.

177 comments