I'm looking for a new terminal. What's your favorite one and why? Which one is popular?
Kitty, hands down. GPU accelerated; native image protocol implemented by
ranger,neofetch, and more; incredibly customizable; multiplexing with multiple windows and tabs; ligature support; and much moreIf anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]
How often do you use images inside a terminal?
Why having a Gpu-accelarated terminal? The computational power used by the graphical rendering of a terminal is minimal...
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
I agree that Konsole are Kitty are both lovely terminals that are very configurable. Kitty for
text file peoplevim 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 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
shinstead 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.tomlwith:[shell] program = "/bin/sh"
I like kitty because:
- multiplexing
- more minimal than DE terminals
- fast
- can display images natively
How often do you use the image display within a terminal?
Kitty is not "minimal" at all, it's full of superfluous features... I used it for many years and I loved it, but I wouldn't say it's "minimal"
I look at images a lot, don't use a real image viewer much
I use foot because it's wayland native and the developer is a very nice person. Only thing missing from it for me is ligature support.
A close second for me is WezTerm. It is very full featured, although I do not use a lot of its features. Developer is also extremely nice and helpful. It does have ligature support.
I personally use tiling window managers, so I have no need for built-in tiling / tabbing features.
I'm on the Alacritty/Tmux/ZSH train. Haven't any issues, other than font scaling differences between laptop and desktop UW monitor.
This is me too, but I just switched to alacritty from urxvt (due to some new bug with control characters).
I prefer my terminal to purely show text, and I use tmux for all the fancy stuff.
XFCE-Terminal. Small, lightweight, Wayland if you use it and plenty of config without cryptic dotfiles.
Plus popularity due to it being the XFCE default and contributed towards by the XFCE team.
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.
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).
