Linux

I don't know if it's the best, but kitty + zsh has been my daily driver for many years.

Wezterm is my primary. Love the built-in domain/sshmux features, especially for work. The LUA config rocks, sky is the limit. Highly portable when using something like Chezmoi or YADM.

That said, it's not always the most performant, especially with certain TUIs. I've been running my NVim workspace in Kitty lately just to avoid the minor UI lag (primarily with lazygit). Not a fan of Kitty (or its dev) otherwise, but it serves its purpose.

If Wezterm ever gets optimized, it'll be the GOAT for me.

Ghostty also sounds like it's got potential, but haven't gotten my invite yet. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Foot with tmux is my goto.

I use whatever with zsh and oh my zsh

ghostty looks promising, but it's in "closed beta" for now. When it's released, it will be public and open source. :)

People keep recommending terminal emulators, but I think they're missing your point.

I'm not aware of anyone making new terminals these days. In my opinion DIGITAL is still king. They are getting a bit hard to come by. VT220 used to be the gold standard, but a VT420 or VT520 is still worth it if you can find one.

Looks like there are a few VT420s on eBay going for up to $200. Prices aren't what they used to be.

I've always been happiest with xfce4-terminal, though I'm using Konsole currently until XFCE fully supports Wayland.

Way back when, I was more than happy with rxvt.

st on Xorg and foot on Wayland

https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis

Ptyxis is my current go-to. It can detect available pods or toolboxes (maybe docker too haven't tested it) and you can open terminals directly into them. It also highlights ssh terms and root shells differently.

There are a huge number of built-in color schemes as well and I've had no trouble finding any configuration option I've found myself wanting to look for.

It's also available on flathub so it's easily installed in most distros.

I've been using xterm, urxvt, and st. Also tested alacrity, kitty, and wezterm. Your shell also plays a critical role in your terminal usage (but I won't deviate here). For my use-case, the latter are overkill so I stayed with st. The only missing feature for me was image support even though I use it sporadically. To cover that I use a script that relies on ueberzug or ucollage if I need to browse folders.

I've wrote a small post about ucollage if you're interested.

Cosmic term is nice. Still just alpha, so there are rough edges though.

Switched from kitty to foot, I like it.

Foot because it's sway default. It's also configurable, has shortcuts and sixel support.

Alacritty. Alacritty. Alacritty. And did I mention Alacritty? (I'm just counting how many I have open atm)

Running Kitty the past year and a bit and really like it. Used to run into weird laggy issues with other terminal emulators, but Kitty runs like a beast for me.

kitty with fish

Tilda because you can roll it down from the top of your screen with one key press.

A Windows VM running Windows terminal, SSH'd back into the host, obviously.

Honestly I stick with whatever the default is and never had a problem that led me to find anything else.

For me: Wezterm. It does pretty much everything. I don't think Alacritty/Kitty etc. offer anything over it for my usage, and the developer is a pleasure to engage with.

Second place is Konsole -- it does a lot, is easy to configure, and obviously integrates nicely with KDE apps.

Honorable mention is Extraterm, which has been working on cool features for a long time, and is now Qt based.

Am I the only one that’s fine with whatever the OS provides out of the box? Like, as long as I can turn the bell off and change the font, I’m chillin, and I have yet to run into a terminal that doesn’t provide those options.

Curious to hear what drives people to seek out other options (besides tiling, that I understand, I’m a tabs guy myself tho)

Good, updated article: https://itsfoss.com/linux-terminal-emulators/

I run multiple terminal apps. I thought I would try a few, and I never deleted any of them.

Tilix is great, complete for my needs.

There is no one-size-fits-all, but for fits most, you're looking at KDE's Konsole or GNOME's new Terminal (formerly Ptyxis). Everything else is going to be niche, with special use cases. What are your specific needs?

What's wrong with kitty?

I've been using kitty for some time didn't had any issues, and multiplexing is useful.

PS: i used tmux for many years, and still use on headless

Depends on what you need actually. I was doing fine with urxvt on Xorg, so foot is a perfect alternative for me on Wayland.