this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
169 points (96.2% liked)

Linux

47971 readers
1298 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I've always just used konsole or gnome terminal. Never really looked into what else is available. Tried cool-retro-term the other day, but the novelty wore off pretty fast for me.

Curious to see if there's a terminal someone swears by and refuses to use anything else.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] shartworx@sh.itjust.works 54 points 9 months ago (5 children)

kitty. it's the first thing I install on a new machine.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Jean_Lurk_Picard@lemmy.world 37 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] cyanarchy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 9 months ago

Seconded, Alacritty has been great to me

[–] WeLoveCastingSpellz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 points 9 months ago (3 children)
[–] themoken@startrek.website 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I used (u)xterm for like 20 years before discovering that Konsole is solid and beautiful. My whole tiling setup is backed up with KDE apps now.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] pelotron@midwest.social 29 points 9 months ago (9 children)

I don't know the difference between a terminal and a terminal emulator, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

Lately using Foot since that's what my distro shipped with.

[–] bluGill@kbin.social 41 points 9 months ago

A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I've never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.

These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn't make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.

Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 9 months ago

Realistically, no difference.

They are called emulators because "Terminal" used to mean a full-screen text interface to a mainframe. The functionality has carried on, which is why terminals behave pretty much the same on any platform. You don't use your system's regular text fields in a terminal emulator, for example.

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 7 points 9 months ago

A terminal is a physical device like a VT100. When people refer to a terminal today it's almost always a terminal emulator running on a TTY, ssh on a PTY, a login shell or a GUI program.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] Trent@lemmy.ml 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wezterm. I love some of it's features (quick search).

[–] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I also love wezterm, but because I was able to easily disable all of it's keyboard shortcuts and only re-enable those few I want (ctrl+shift+V, F11, ctrl+"=", ctrl+ "-"). I use tmux for everything and I really love that I can "debloat" the shortcuts and don't have to care about colliding keybinds when configuring things like neovim.

[–] jodanlime@midwest.social 22 points 9 months ago (4 children)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] thejodie@programming.dev 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Terminator.

I use the broadcast, zoom, grouping, and the guake/yakuake style dropdown. Also it has layout switching like xmonad, ie you can ctrl + space to cycle pane layouts.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] mycoffeeisready@feddit.nl 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Alacritty (with tmux if I need a multiplexor)

[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

You might also be interested in checking out Zellij, it's like tmux with nice defaults

[–] LiamMayfair@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 9 months ago

Kitty. Fast (GPU-accelerated), Wayland-compatible, and has a built-in image viewer, among other things.

[–] verdigris@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 months ago

Foot if you're on Wayland, alacritty if you're not.

[–] banazir@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Konsole does everything I need it to.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz 13 points 9 months ago

Gnome terminal

[–] backhdlp@iusearchlinux.fyi 13 points 9 months ago

Kitty, because I like it more than the KDE and GNOME terminals, and I prefer native multiplexing

[–] doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 9 months ago

Alacritty

No particular reason why. It's fast, it works, and I've already got it configured how I like it.

I've used kitty and a couple others. It really doesn't make much difference to me tbh.

[–] ruckblack@sh.itjust.works 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I like yakuake, I'm spoiled by the drop-down terminal at this point

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] GearToward@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I use wezterm on wayland. It has built in tabs so its better than just using another window or tmux imo

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] fleet@lemmy.ca 12 points 9 months ago

wezterm. Works great on wayland and the documentation is amazing. And it's built in rust if you're one of those people.

[–] cetvrti_magi@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Alacritty, no particular reason. It's fast and I already made it look how I want so there is no reason to switch.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Olap@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

So Konsole rocks. Yakuake a great addition. But I'm a big KDE fanboy

Alacritty is also pretty fun, combined with openbox / LXDE

But for the $dayjob it's Windows Terminal which is easily the best thing Microsoft has released in decades when combined with WSL

[–] wiikifox@pawb.social 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

st. It just works. I'm always opening and closing terminals, and 90% of the stuff I use have's a TUI. st launches before I can even notice, under 4GB of RAM, and the entire install is less than a MiB.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] gzrrt@kbin.social 10 points 9 months ago

Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm partial to a bit of Tilix personality.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Ashiette@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Konsole and Yakuake... It's sufficient

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] pingveno@lemmy.ml 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Gnome Terminal. I've tried out a few others, but at this point I'm kind of partial to just using the default with good integration with the rest of the desktop. Pop, in this case. I'm curious if they'll adopt something else for the terminal in COSMIC.

Edit: They just recently announced COSMIC Terminal, so that's a yes. I look forward to trying it out. It's based on alacritty's framework.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No love for Terminator?

I spend my day working on it. Multiple tabs, multiple vertical and horizontal panes, good keyboard shortcuts, profiles, themes... What more do you want?

[–] breakcore@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 9 months ago

Terminator was my super goto terminal emulator the last decade or so. Love it.

Recently switched to foot, because of GPU acceleration, touch screen support and wayland amongst others.

But I miss splitting windows and being able to send keystrokes to multiple windows/groups.

Try Terminator if you haven't - it's really nice!

[–] Commiunism@lemmy.wtf 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Kitty for both X and Wayland - I like the customization (as in I already have the config file that I have backed up and can just plop it in), it works perfectly on any VM (used it on sway, hyprland, i3, awesomewm), though honestly I don't see much of a difference between the terminal emulators. There's literally no wrong choice or meaningful difference in my experience at least, but admittedly I just use a terminal emulator to run commands, neovim and system file editing.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] deezbutts@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago (6 children)

I'm high AF and new to Linux, what is a terminal emulator?

[–] rufus@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

So the “terminal” is the basic CLI that you use in the single-user, text-based mode. Terminal emulators are graphical programs that run in multi-user, graphics-based mode, and they hook into the terminal and allow you to access it inside graphical sessions. Some examples would be alacritty, kitty, urxvt, konsole, or terminator

[–] deezbutts@lemm.ee 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for taking the time.

I've been using the literal terminal app like a caveman I guess... What do these weird apps give me over my regular terminal?

People mentioned tabs and stuff but like... I have tabs?

[–] Jordan_U@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago

Every "terminal app" is a terminal emulator, because non-emulated terminals are physical pieces of hardware.

So you are already using a terminal emulator, I'd guess Gnome Terminal, and it's a fairly full featured modern terminal emulator (in my opinion at least).

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] superminerJG@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

I use WezTerm. Highly configurable and supports every image display protocol under the sun.

[–] Hack3900@lemy.lol 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Big fan of kitty for font ligatures support and how splits/tabs work

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] turbowafflz@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Kitty, but I don't have any particular reason it's just there and it works

[–] Magister@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

whatever ship with the distro when I want to open a terminal...

[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Konsole and yakuake as the drop down for quick tasks

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Rosco@sh.itjust.works 6 points 9 months ago
[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

I like the slide-down ones so Guake or ddterm (a Gnome shell extension). I always remap caps lock to control and the “Caps Lock” + tilde shortcut to get to the terminal is such a part of my muscle memory that I think I’d lose my mind trying to change at this point.

[–] greengnu 6 points 9 months ago

rxvt-unicode with tabbedex.

I refuse to use a terminal emulator that needs more than 100MB of RAM to display 80x24 green text on a black display

[–] Titou@feddit.de 5 points 9 months ago
load more comments
view more: next ›