I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I’m curious what the good options are for terminals. I’ve skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they’re too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I’m aware that there’s not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I’m curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?
Personally I’ve just been using konsole since it’s what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I’m missing out on features I don’t even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.
Are you serious? It’s just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I’m mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don’t need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can’t imagine what other features may I need.
Multiplexing, remote multiplexing, shell integration, SSH integration, image rendering, ligatures, image rendering (mainly for TUI file managers like Yazi), support for font styling, scrollback searching, persistent sessions.
Many of these might not matter to you, but I use a lot of these features very frequently, especially remote multiplexing which only Kitty and Wezterm do AFAIK.
I also paricularly like Westerns feature where you can press a keybind and itll show two character flags over all the links and paths currently being displayed, and you type the flag to copy it. Let’s me avoid switching my hand over to my mouse.
Most of what you enumerated is not a terminal emulator job. There is tmux for multiplexing, search and persistent sessions, for instance. And if you want image rendering, what a hell you use TUI for this? GUI programs can also be controlled with keyboard.
Says who? You aren’t the arbiter of what software gets to handle each job.
Tmux does a worse job than Wezterm while being more complex, a pain in the ass to configure, and feeling less native than just using the built-in tabs and panes of my terminal. Ive also had it break the output and interfere with the keybinds of many apps. Why the hell should I install and configure an extra tool when Wezterm does what I need perfect?
Because I like using a TUI? I do the large majority of my work in my terminal, so why should I swap out of it to look at a picture when Wezterm does it just fine? More importantly, why do you give a fuck what tools somebody uses if they work for them?
I dont give a shit about “Unix philosophy”, Wezterm works better for me at all of these tasks than any other options.
I have never seen a GUI file manager with the same level of control using a keyboard as the average TUI file manager.
GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.
What do you want to accelerate? And for what you need more than 256 colors?
If you’re on a high-refresh display, the GPU acceleration allows for much faster updates. Makes it feel much smoother. It’s of course not needed, but neither is a lot of stuff we do.
This is a literal box with text on your screen, what do you mean by “smoother”?
You can just go test it out yourself. Compare using a TUI in a hardware accelerated terminal to one that isnt. If you use a lot of TUIs or very dynamic CLIs it makes a very noticeable difference
What’s up with the attitude like gpu accelerated terminals aren’t extremely popular? If you’re fine with what you’re using, have fun and tone down the high horse.
Umm, what I said: the updates happen faster. If you have a GPU maybe you should try it?
That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.
The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?
Yeah I have been, I’ve just seen discussion about terminals that do all kinds of fancy shit and I’m wondering if I’m missing out on features by using the default (konsole), though it seems fairly full-featured. shrug