What is your favorite terminal emulator.

I just use konsole , which is the default terminal emulator for KDE. I don't need anything fancy, just something basic to run commands, updates, a few scripts, etc.

alacritty

cool-retro-term 😎 to live in retro cyberpunk dreamland

I primarily use Alacritty. I spend quite a lot of time running things that produce ludicrous amounts of output (eg. compiling Android from source). Out of 10 or so terminal emulators I've tested earlier this year, it was the only one that didn't use 100% CPU displaying all that output, staying in the low single digits.

I'd prefer to use Wezterm because I like its lua configuration system and the builtin pane splitting, but with my workload, I still run into issues where its CPU usage shoots to 100% and becomes non-responsive for a while. (That said, it's already a lot better than before. I try to report any issues I can reliably reproduce and Wez has been wonderful about fixing them.)

I use foot together with foot-server. The client opens in less than a millisecond, and I usually have tens of terminal windows open at the same time. Tabbing comes from the window manager.

I ike konsole

When I'm using a tiling window manager, I use kitty, because I like its speed and support for font ligatures. When I'm using a Desktop Environment like Gnome or KDE I usually don't use the terminal at all, but if I need it, I use the default emulator.

Gnome terminal. I don't really care the terminal emulator. What's in the terminal is what's important. The terminal window just needs to be able to resize correctly though.

I like my kitty

Anything, but with tmux running inside. You can copy text even in a tty, split the terminal window, detach from and attach to tmux sessions, etc. I will never use a terminal for any moderately complex task without tmux again :)

I use Kitty, because it works well on both X and Wayland, and is GPU accelerated. For some reason, Alacritty doesn't display the fonts properly (Displays them much smaller on Wayland. Only program I have such issues with)

Also Kitty is more widely packaged (for example on Debian based distros)

I use wezterm, but there are many good ones

Personally I've been using gnome-terminal for quite a while and was fairly happy except that I needed to maintain gnome-terminal and libvte patches to get notification support. Having some sort of notification when a long-running command completes is very important to my productivity.

I've been using Konsole but not fully happy.

• No hyperlink support.
• Selection is lost when my prompt updates (I have the time so that I know when I have started commands).

I've been looking at other options but none-of them feel quite right.

Alacritty:

• No unlimited scrollback.

Kitty:

• Selection bug with updating prompt.
• No unlimited scrollback.

Wezterm:

• No unlimited scrollback.

Terminator:

• Has this terminal group bar that I can't get rid of.
• No notification support.

I realize that I am probably going to have to make a compromise (probably just go back to gnome-terminal with patches) but I figured it would be interesting to see what everyone else was using and make sure I didn't miss something.

To me the important features are:

1. Unlimited scrollback.
2. Notification support (ideally with the 777 Notify command, but if the terminal bell can make a notification that is fine).
3. Clean UI. (I don't use tabs so need to be able to hide the tab bar)
4. Hyperlink support.

urxvt. It works good enough and doesn't use much memory.

I almost exclusively use Yakuake nowadays. I like the drop down terminal.

foot is great. Simple, fast, and customisable enough for my needs.

Alacritty is great, but I switched to wezterm due to ligatures support

Yakuake, I can't use anything other than a quake based terminal. Because of my work I need 24/7 quick access to a terminal, yakuake is just that

I'm using foot since I've installed sway and it's just fine ..not a super user to evaluate well

Kitty has awesome framerates, easily hitting 90fps pushing 150k - 180k per frame. Alacrity is also dope.

Alacritty for me

st is good enough for my needs. I use tmux for multiplexing, scrollback, and tabs

Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as "A high-end terminal for low-end systems".

kitty

Terminator is the one I've been using for a while

Anything that supports solarized dark and solarized light theming. It is so much less eyestrain

Kitty with catppuccin and 50%-ish transparency. Works like a charm. And also if you add something like what kitti3 does (look it up on github), will be even better.

Tilix

I love wezterm, primarily because it is cross platform. The most important factor to me is being able to use the same one on Windows, Mac and Linux, because I use all three on a regular basis and don't want to maintain multiple configs. However, wezterm currently has a bug that prevents it from opening on Wayland+Nvidia which forces me to use something else on Linux. None of the other ones get close imo.

St with few patches and personal customizations is amazing.

I recommend black box. https://flathub.org/apps/com.raggesilver.BlackBox it is the nicest and most intergrated terminal on gnome and I use it daily and have zero issues

alacritty. the only downside for me is no ligatures

Whatever gets me connected to my tmux session over ssh

Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.

While y'all here:

is there a terminal emulator that has "modern" text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z...

Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character..

xfce4-terminal has transparency and warns when I'm about to paste multiple lines to it.

Wezterm, which does everything, with a great developer behind it.

Second choice is Konsole: super solid and great rendering.

Aaand tmux with either of those.

I rather enjoy Tilix. It can tile a single tab without tmux and it can also give special handling to links matched from regexps. I use it to go from Python stacktraces to correct line in Emacs with just a click. It can also do Quake-like terminal, which I use alot.

The project is looking for maintainers, though, so it's possible at some point I need to start looking for alternatives..

Yakuake. I've been using it for more than a decade and love it.

I really like wezterm, mainly because it's configured in Lua and you can easily disable all keyboard shortcuts and allow only the ones you want. I do everything in Tmux, so my only shortcut s are for changing font size and full-screening window.

St, Xterm, Terminator - depends on hardware and os.

I'm most comfortable when my window manager and terminal emulator are well integrated and keyboard centric.

I really love Tabby

Tabs, CMD, SSH, Powershell... all included. It has multiple profiles, can be used portable, has themes and Integrations, like one for Docker

Never need anything else imo 😊

I'm currently using Tilix, although I haven't found any terminal emulator I'm just wholly in love with yet.

xterm

respect the classics :)

xterm. Simple. Gets the job done.

I use black box flatpak.

St

st. LukeSmithxyz's fork specifically.

Xterm is fine and everywhere.

guake-terminal for a full-screen overlay terminal, I have a keybinding for transparency toggle so I can read guides through the overlay. I used to use tilda, but I switched because they weren’t supporting wayland.

For random/ad-hoc terminals I’ve historically used gnome-terminal and console, but recently I’ve been trying to eliminate window decoration entirely, and for that I’ve been liking black box (flatpak) for the floating decoration and other configuration bits.

They both support theming, and have dracula included by default, so it was easy enough to get a consistent look and feel.

I have tabs switched off for all of them. That’s what tmux is for.

edit: I’ll probably be checking out alacritty

Emacs with vterm

Basically what Silva said. When I'm going out of my way to install something, kitty. Else I roll with my DE's default, which in my case is usually gnome-terminal.

I have Guake for passive tasks like music payback or anytime I want a full screen terminal to hold my focus, like when I'm writing in Neovim.

Tillix is my active terminal. Taking notes, active chat sessions, or running a SSH connection. Anything that I want on screen permanently.

i used to use urxvt but i had some issues with certain fonts and symbols loading, so i’ve since switched over to kitty, and it works fine for me

I use vterm in emacs if I'm doing something quick, but if I'm actually using the terminal for a task, I use blackbox because it integrates nicely with gnome. I just use vterm if I'm using exwm.

Terminology, with the Nyan Cat cursor! ^. :3

Unironically: vscode terminal. It's the terminal that has less bugs when using shift+arrows to select text. I also use PowerShell because bash doesn't allow text selection with keyboard.

Tested dozen recently… And nothing was so much better to change the default one of KDE.

Used to urxvt (when I was using tilling vm on desktop pc). Used gnome-terminal when I was on cinnamon. I switched to KDE year or so ago and I'm using Konsole. It really does not matter that much, I only need tab support and 256 colors.

Kitty, though I have been looking into st as I recently switched to dwm.

Alacritty....rust it all

Emacs!

@kevincox For light tasks, I will make use of either vterm (if I'm in Emacs) or Alacritty (if I'm not).

If I need to get down to serious work (such as working on shells and text files both locally and remotely), I'll jump into eshell, using TRAMP when I need to go remote or sudo (or both) to edit files. I'll still use vterm if I need something that does screen redrawing, such as apt.

I mostly use the default terminal emulator in the desktop environment I use, currently this is the gnome terminal.

What are the main reasons one want to use another terminal emulator? IMHO if I can reszie the window and the font and font size is good or configurable it is fine..

BlackBox for Linux, the UI is very clean and fit so well with the rest of Gnome apps

I'm liking Warp, Tabby and Wezterm currently. Working on a config for my NixOS Hyprland and planning to see how foot does in comparison. Blackbox was pretty cool, but didn't use it much.

Terminology with screen and zsh.

Alacritty with tmux 👍

XTerm. I used to use rxvt-unicode, but it only supports 256 colors and gave me grief when I tried to get some emacs color theme working. There's only one thing I miss, which is that rxvt-unicode reflows lines when you resize the terminal, which xterm won't do. Oh and urxvtc starts very slightly faster, but no big deal.

I also looked at kitty, and I like that the author of that one tries to champion new features, like full keyboard support on par with X11 apps. But it takes noticeably longer to start and the latency also feels worse.

Tilda, because I could drop it down my screen anytime with one key tap.

I mean, the Deepin one is gorgeous to look at, but that's not usually my concern if I'm typing in some code. My go to is Yakuake running a fish session, launched with a "Super + #" hotkey combo. Rapid access, easy to use, doesn't get in the way, customisable so it at least looks in keeping with the rest of the DE.

But I don't want to die!

Plain ol bash

But I'm using yakuake which makes it beyond amazingly cool. Been using g that for over a decade and I'd never stop using that.