kitty. it's the first thing I install on a new machine.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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alacritty
Seconded, Alacritty has been great to me
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Wezterm. I love some of it's features (quick search).
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.
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.
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Kitty. Fast (GPU-accelerated), Wayland-compatible, and has a built-in image viewer, among other things.
Alacritty (with tmux if I need a multiplexor)
Foot if you're on Wayland, alacritty if you're not.
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.
Gnome terminal
wezterm. Works great on wayland and the documentation is amazing. And it's built in rust if you're one of those people.
Kitty, because I like it more than the KDE and GNOME terminals, and I prefer native multiplexing
I use wezterm on wayland. It has built in tabs so its better than just using another window or tmux imo
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Alacritty, no particular reason. It's fast and I already made it look how I want so there is no reason to switch.
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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.
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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
Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me
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.
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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?
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!
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.
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I use WezTerm. Highly configurable and supports every image display protocol under the sun.
Kitty, but I don't have any particular reason it's just there and it works
I'm high AF and new to Linux, what is a terminal emulator?
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
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?
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).
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Fun fact!
Teletypes predate "computers" and were used for efficiently transmitting and recording text.
Here is a purely mechanical teletype from the 1930s being used to interface with a modern Linux machine:
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whatever ship with the distro when I want to open a terminal...
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
Alacritty (with screen if I need a multiplexor)
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.
st
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