I'm reconsidering my terminal emulator and was curious what everyone was using.
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.)
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.
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 never got into Quake, but I love the concept of having a terminal whenever you want with a simple press of an F-key.
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
Oooh, this looks perfect for me. However how do hyperlinks work? I can see that they are styled and have a unique cursor but I can't for the life of me figure out what I need to do to actually activate them. I've tried click, Ctrl-click, Shift-click, Alt-click 😅
https://gitlab.gnome.org/raggesilver/blackbox/-/issues/297 it could possibly be this bug. I am not entirely sure. My use case does not feature many hyperlinks so sorry if I got ya excited for something you can't use
Ah yeah. I was trying with ls. That's a shame but not a major issue for me. Hopefully they fix it soon. Sounds like it should be fairly easy as it is mostly implemented.
I'm using foot since I've installed sway and it's just fine ..not a super user to evaluate well
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 never got the copy part right, what configs are you using?
also, can you copy from a remote (ssh) tmux?
Copying in tmux (assuming default keybindings):
- Enter copy mode with Ctrl+b, [
- Position the cursor at the start of the text to be copied, press Ctrl+SPACE to start copying
- Position the cursor at the end of the text, press Alt+w or Ctrl+w to copy into the tmux buffer
- Press Ctrl+b, ] to paste, possibly into different pane :)
By 'copy', I meant between different tmux panes/windows.
If you open tmux on your host, split it into two panes and SSH into the server in one of them, then you can use this copy functionality. I'm personally not aware of a way to copy between a remote and local tmux session.
ah yes sorry i meant copy to system clipboard.
i succeed in configuring vim so it uses the system clipboard on both local and remote sessions.
i would like to do the same with tmux, but as you said too, it does not seem to be a way.
You absolutely can. You just have to use a clipboard command as the copy/paste. Add this to your
~/.tmux.confbind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xsel -i -b" bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xsel -i -b"or use your favorite cli clipboard command. Note that those are using the vi bindings; you might have to adapt the config.
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..
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.
Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.
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:
- Unlimited scrollback.
- Notification support (ideally with the 777 Notify command, but if the terminal bell can make a notification that is fine).
- Clean UI. (I don't use tabs so need to be able to hide the tab bar)
- Hyperlink support.
You can use zellij for infinite scrollback. If ot takes too muxh space, use compact mode.
Also, I use konsole and it does have hyperlink support, just control-click the links.
My choice as well. I do my C++ development in Vim, and the keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs were the best I'd found. The easy screen-splitting is great when manipulating virtual machines, or having a man page open when working on scripts.
Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as "A high-end terminal for low-end systems".
