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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?

#61

Post by spoiler »

Zizizizz wrote: post #8

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

I want to second this! Wez term has great support for fonts, including ligatures, and it's configured/scripted via Lua; pretty neat. It's got a great ssh mode, too (with `wezterm ssh...`). It's got many great features.

On Mac I currently use https://www.warp.dev/ and I love the editor prompt feature! The search/ai is helpful sometimes (I use fish, so a bit less so, but fish makes up for it), and the cheat-sheet/template feature (forgot the name now) is cool, too!

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

#64

Post by t-3 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #55
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.

Yeah, it's just a convenience that isn't necessary at all. Moving between different systems can be annoying trying to find out if I have screen, cu, minicom etc, would be nice to just XTerm --serial /dev/ttyUSB0 or something.

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

#66

Post by nine_k »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #57
nine_k wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many thanks! I'll try this.

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

#67

Post by nathanasmith »

If I need a standalone window I reach for lxterminal. It's lightweight, modern enough looking, and does exactly what I need without any annoyance. Most of the time though I just use guake which as most everybody here knows is a terminal that works like old school first person shooter consoles where you press a button and it appears down from the top of your screen, press the hotkey again and it tucks back up and away. If I'm using a Mac a good alternative to guake is iTerm which has similar functionality.

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

#68

Post by anotherevan »

I've used KDE for decades before switching to Awesomewm, so still use Konsole (and Dolphin for that matter). In particular I like having the tabs row along the bottom, detection of URLs with the option to open, and the reasonably clean look stylistically.

I'm open to changing, perhaps something that's a little faster at starting, but not found one that makes me go "a-ha" yet. Tilix looks like it has potential - may play with it a bit more. If I can get rid of the toolbar...

Also, alternative file manager to Dolphin with a similar feature set...

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

#70

Post by gh02t »

justin_oaks wrote: post #51
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 mult…

I use Kitty with Tmux, no reason you can't. It's still a fast and simple terminal even without the other features.
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