I've been using urxvt on i3 for man years, just recently replaced it with kitty. Seems like it stays.
What made you change? And what does kitty improved for you?
Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
121–130 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#122Yakuake. You're easily spoilt by a quake mode terminal and it's hard to go without it. Tab management and shortcuts are great. Full utf8 support. It's essentially the same as Konsole, all the internals are shared libraries. That all said, dunno how it would fly with a tiling window manager.
I use Yakuake with the Awesome tiling window manager and as long as you add it to the rule for floating clients in your rc.lua it works perfectly.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
With `pwd`, `gb` and `gs` why do I need prompt taking up horizontal space?
zsh has a built-in feature which shows the cwd aligned to the right end of the prompt line. It even disappears if you happen to type far enough into the line.
This is an underappreciated zsh feature for sure.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#124Forgive 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've chosen my terminal because it looks better, and renders font beautifully, and it is fast.
I look at a terminal for hours a day, so looks matter. And there are several cli tools where I can see Gnome's built-in terminal lag.
Other factors include whether it has built-in multiplexer so you don't have to deal with tmux, and picture-in-terminal support
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#125Follow 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A little out of date, but useful I think: https://danluu.com/term-latency/ EDIT: Should say a lot of this is Mac
Wasn't expecting to see st be on the slower end and emacs on the faster end.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#126vterm inside emacs.
vterm is sufficiently standard terminal emulator. Emacs plays the role of a windows manager (manages multiple vterm windows (buffers in emacs terms)). Easy to save/restore window configurations.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#127urxvt. It's very fast. I do a non-scientific benchmark of 'time find ~'. After repeats I see: urxvt=3.86s, alacritty=4.25s, kitty=7.62s, xterm=14.04s. (That xterm time feels suspect, I remember it being faster) Mostly it was an improvement over xterm. I setup runtime font size change, a perl script to open new terms in the same working directory, and scroll bar the way I like. On my newer setup for wayland I settled…
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down for even the slightest mention of urxvt. It feels like it was the One True Terminal for minimal desktops at one point, yet it's taken a backseat in the terminal wars. I'm sure it's mostly due to its default configuration trying to emulate xterm, making it behave and feel ancient.
It's extremely efficient and surprisingly powerful with its perl scripting and plethora of extensions using it. I keep finding out about functionality I didn't know about, and much like vim, my usage of it has been evolving over the years. It really has no shortcomings to me, and I wish I could keep using it properly in Wayland. Everything else just feels either too tacky with its game-changing features or too minimal.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#128Terminator for a couple years now, because it has native support for split windows and is otherwise pretty good. tmux is great, but it essentially breaks multi-line text selection (you end up selecting bits of text from an adjacent pane), an update in any pane will cancel text selection in any other pane, and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work. Terminator solves those issues and also has great unicode/IME support --…
> tmux is great, but it essentially breaks multi-line text selection (you end up selecting bits of text from an adjacent pane), an update in any pane will cancel text selection in any other pane, and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work.
Typically you let tmux handle the text selection and clipboard management under these circumstances, which fixes all the text selection issues you mention. You can also enable scroll wheel support in tmux! Idr if it requires a plugin or something, but I have it in my config somewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#129urxvtd + urxvtc I just got used to it over the years. I also have a number of extensions which I would miss. Also it is just very responsive and low on resources; same league as xterm. Also nowadays terminfo is mostly available on remote machines; I mainly work remote (I had an odroid as local system for quite a while). I would say, there is no reason to have a terminal which does tiling, there is tmux which brings m…
> Also, what the heck with gpu enabled terminals?
On some operating systems, prior to GPU acceleration, all existing terminal emulators were so slow that they caused noticeable and frustrating lag under some circumstances, for example running tmux with text scrolling in multiple panes.
Since then, we've seen the rise of cross-platform, performance-oriented terminal emulators (Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm) on the one hand and tmux adopt what amounts to frame dropping in the other (check out the fork called tmux-sixel if you prefer not to have this behavior or want sixel-based terminal graphics support).
I do not understand why terminal emulator performance, especially on Windows and Mac, used to be so atrocious that only GPU-accelerated terminal emulators didn't suck there. Konsole, xterm, st, urxvt, and even GNOME Terminal have never needed to resort to that just to avoid massive flickering and lag.
Re: Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?
#130Konsole, and yakuake as its Quake-like version. It comes with the Plasma desktop and it has all features I need plus a million more. And it's reasonably fast.
Quake-mode (being able to hide/show with a global hotkey) is a required feature for me, and yakuake is one of the few that support it. I have no idea how anyone gets any work done without being able to quickly get to a terminal. Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit. That gets me through the work day, when I'm stuck on Windows.
> Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit.
Can you permanently resize it? Last I tried it, it was slow and I didn't see how to make it fullscreen or behave predictably on multimonitor setups, so I couldn't actually use it.