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Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#51

Post by justin_oaks »

justin_oaks wrote: post #38

Forgive my ignorance, but what are big differences between terminal emulators that push people to one vs another? Does making use of terminal multiplexer, like tmux or GNU screen, make some of those differences less important? I mostly use whatever terminal emulator is on my system. Currently that's xfce4-terminal. But I use GNU screen so I only ever have one terminal window open and I almost exclusively use the keyb…

Several people mentioned Kitty, so I looked at the screencast on the Kitty website to see what features Kitty has. While it has some neat features, like showing the current directory or the currently running command, I'm pretty sure that running tmux or GNU screen would break those features and most others.

So it looks to me like you can use a fancy terminal emulator with cool features, or you can use a terminal multiplexer (tmux or GNU screen), but the two don't mix.

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#52

Post by infinet »

cjm42 wrote: post #9

xfce4-terminal, because I switched to Xfce when GNOME went on their "reinvent the UI" trek. I was happy with the UI I already had, thanks very much.

Same here. Need its tabs since it is difficult to organize many terminal windows if use rxvt. I also use LXTerminal on the same machine. It's set to dark background to make flask's debug message easier to read. LXTerminal is very lite and adds very little(or no) additional dependence on Debian.

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#53

Post by camgunz »

t6jvcereio wrote: post #16

Follow up, what's the Linux terminal with the lowest latency? What about the one with the highest thru put? Debian if that matters

A little out of date, but useful I think: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

EDIT: Should say a lot of this is Mac

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#54

Post by tomrod »

camgunz wrote: post #31

I used the terminal in gVim (:terminal). It's pretty close to xterm in terms of responsiveness, supports Unicode, and lets you avoid a multiplexer like GNU screen or tmux. Fallback is good old xterm (always have a fallback).

Uninformed person here. Why is avoiding a multiplexer desirable?

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#55

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

t-3 wrote: post #48

XTerm. It's fast and it works. I wish it could be attached as a serial terminal like st though. Lately I've found that I'm more productive just dropping into a console with docs on an eReader though.

Gnu screen can connect to serial ports so you can use any terminal emulator as a serial terminal.

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#56

Post by qbasic_forever »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #50
qbasic_forever wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What feature of Windows Terminal are you missing? It's been ages since I've used it but I can't think of anything I haven't seen in Linux terminal emulators. Gnome Terminal is the closest IMHO as it has custom profiles and colorschemes that are similar to what I remember from Windows. Pixel shaders are the only thing I can think that you won't commonly find in Linux terminals, but there is cool-retro-term for that ki…

Mame has a VT100 emulator and you can enable shaders with that if you want scanlines and pincushion distortion.

Oh wow I had no idea they emulated a VT100. That's awesome!

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#57

Post by qbasic_forever »

nine_k wrote: post #45
cbsks wrote: post #18

Kitty is an amazing terminal if you are willing to spend some time to learn and customize it. Take a look at the screencast on its website, it is super powerful and will make your coworkers and friends jealous. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

Kitty and Alacritty miss one feature which is key to me: assigning a separate color to bold face. I read a lot of output that only has bold face markup, like man pages or top output. They are way easier to read if bold face stands out more than, well, just thicker letter strokes. So I'm stuck with xfce4-terminal.

Those terminals support bold rendered using ANSI bright colors as a config option and then you can set the ANSI brights to whatever custom colors you prefer.

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#58

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jolmg wrote: post #35
t6jvcereio wrote: post #16

Follow up, what's the Linux terminal with the lowest latency? What about the one with the highest thru put? Debian if that matters

By latency, I guess you mean its launching speed? I like urxvt for that. I started using it back when I was on a netbook. So much quicker to launch than gnome-terminal or konsole. I didn't even need its daemon functionality which should be even quicker to open up windows. On throughput, I guess you mean its refresh rate? Among its many options, I remember there's one about skipping drawing content when it's coming in…

Terminal latency is the delay between hitting a key and a glyph showing up on screen. There can be multiple layers of keyboard mapping and drawing APIs that slow this down compared to minimalistic terminal emulators from 30 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

#59

Post by CoolCold »

justin_oaks wrote: post #38

Forgive my ignorance, but what are big differences between terminal emulators that push people to one vs another? Does making use of terminal multiplexer, like tmux or GNU screen, make some of those differences less important? I mostly use whatever terminal emulator is on my system. Currently that's xfce4-terminal. But I use GNU screen so I only ever have one terminal window open and I almost exclusively use the keyb…

I have 3 to 10 terminals open per virtual desktop on average.

Screen/tmux lives inside each of them with 99.9% chance.

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