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What's your favorite terminal?

I'm looking for a new terminal. What's your favorite one and why? Which one is popular?

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  • 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.

      • Some people just like GUI more

        • Well yeah. But would you rather a GUI that stores the settings in easy to read and manipulate plain text files; Linux, or an archaic GUI that manipulates raw data and often breaks and is hard to understand; Windows registry.
          Even if you prefer GUIs, you'd probably still want the data stored in plain text files for the sake of simplicity and consistency.

    • 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

    • 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.

    • 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

        • Oh I think I know what you mean. Did you try setting your shell to something like sh instead of bash or zsh and see if it was a shell startup issue?

          • sh is just an alias for the default shell. And also idk how to set that

            • And your default shell is a POSIX compliant shell, usually dash or ash, so that's what I mean by sh. You can set it in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml with:

              [shell]
program = "/bin/sh"
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