"Am I just an old man..."
-Lord Nikon
I definitely am not getting old, nor am I Zero Cool
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
64 points (94.4% liked)
Linux
48855 readers
1280 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
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Lol zerocool is around here too. I have him tagged it's always fun when we meet in a thread.
Use whatever you like. You know your needs better than anybody else. As for me, I like Konsole and I will stick to that.
I'm no connoisseur, but I just want the same feel as I had back in the 90s. No terminal emulator, straight up tty with crisp VGA ROM fonts at some hacky SuperVGA resolution. Before the virtual framebuffer that basically every computer today uses for tty.
Konsole, gnome-terminal and ghostty can all be made to feel right to me. I'm giving ghostty a spin, and I like how it supports custom shaders so I can make it feel even more like home.
I chose Kitty cause of the name and I have never looked at anything else.
Another happy Kitty user here!
I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.
Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.
Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.
I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.
What's its advantages over Terminator? Does it have any?
GPU-accelerated, likely faster and less mem usage (Python vs Zig), and image rendering.
Multiple GNOME terminals in one window!
Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.
terminator sounds great. never heard of it. i did try ghostty, but i can't help myself opening xfce terminal. muscle memory.
Hmm you interested me
Yeah it's great I have a hot key super + Enter to open terminator so the mussle memory doesn't change if I change terminals
Prefer baratty
Edit: baratty -> bara tiddy
This is a very good joke
I switched from terminator to alacritty a while back. Moved to kitty a few months until a bug was fixed. I do try out new terminals occasionally, but nothing feels as nice as alacritty to me so i stay.
Is there a reason to change? I use foot terminal, have also used Alacritty and Kitty previously.
I loved terminator but after learning tmux I just don't really see much point in the main feature. I use xfce4-terminal on i3 these days.
I use yakuake (or guake if I still used gnome), I love having a consitent terminal slide down the screen every time I press a shortcut, especially if it's supplememtary to what I'm doing in the graphical shell.
And I love the theming options such as transparency. I fell in love with Yakuake a loooong time ago and still love it ! Autohide on outside click and multiple tabbed terminals in the same super easy access window.
Eh, why would you? They're fancy looking but if what you use works for you that's about it.
Afaik terminator is unmaintained but some people still use it. I've heard of Tilix as a good alternative but can't tell you if that's the case as I haven't used either. I change terminals only if there's a feature my current one doesn't have.
I used alacritty (because that's what came with the distro I used, ArcoLinux) until I switched to Wayland where alacritty font scaling was inconsistent across Xorg and Wayland sessions (and I was still switching between the two). So I went to kitty, until I was convinced to switch to foot because it seemed to open faster so I went to it. Then I switched to COSMIC which doesn't let me remove window decorations server-side and neither kitty nor foot supported their removal client side, so I switched to alacritty which did.
I will switch to COSMIC terminal for convenience (as I use COSMIC) when they fix their font rendering (it's like old Alacritty, only that modern Alacritty has fixed it but cosmic-term still hasn't).
On my Mac, I use Retroterm because emulates Old CRT screens - with scan lines and ghosting and stuff .
Does nothing , crashes sometimes, but is Lots of fun if you’re the guy that remembers floppies.
theres a cool preset called "futuristic" on the linux version (cool retro term) -with a bit of tweaking you can make it look like a terminal from the alien franchise
Ooh didn't know that...
(rushes off to try it)
Terminal emulators are pretty niche. I also tend to stick with what's included with the DE. I've only used a third party terminal when I used gnome. Blackbox, as the one included in gnome at the time was still using gtk3.
How are they niche? I'm not trying to be a dick or anything. I genuinely don't understand.
Terminal emulators are pretty niche.
Lol
Imagine being this guy above me and thinking that the percent of people that would switch out from their default shipped DE terminal emulator is anything but a minority 🤪
I mean, you work with what's there. But the world works (not runs, that's the shell) on them.
Nah, the world uses what's there. It's a small subset that even works on them directly. See also: xkcd meme about infra being supported by one guy in some random state.
Terminator isn't supported anymore as far as I remember. A good substitution for it is Tilix. I'd been using the latter for a while but recently I switched to the new default terminal in Fedora (it had weird name that I unable to remember) and Tilling Shell extension for Gnome.
Tilix is great but also unmaintained.
Maintainers wanted. At least it's not completely dead...
The main advantages I have felt with fancy terminals are
- GPU accelerated means scrolling feels smoother
- Nice single configuration file for the terminal which I can easily move around
- Launches slightly faster. Only noticeable when you are launching multiple terminals
Launches faster sounds like you have a weird shell config.
Also scrolling isn't really existing in a terminal. If you are tail -f somefile then it depends on how fast it is written to, how fast tail is.
If you have some TUI tool open it dependa how fast it can emit it's UI.
If your program only emits 100MB data each seconds then a terminal sink of 30GB/s wouldn't really benefit.
Power users like me run a terminal multiplexer anyways so there is another bottleneck.
And the configuration is onetime only (if the terminal configuration will be downward compatible with a version 10 years from now).
view more: next ›