16
votes
What terminal emulator do you use?
What are your experiences with your current terminal emulator or former ones? What makes you use your current terminal emulator? What shell do you use?
What are your experiences with your current terminal emulator or former ones? What makes you use your current terminal emulator? What shell do you use?
iTerm2 with zsh
Used to use Tilix. It's super nice and I'd recommend it to anyone in a GTK enviroent who wants an advanced terminal. But since 3.32 I'm back on GNOME Terminal just because it's preinstalled and it's always what launches when I right click to open a terminal in Nautilus.
termite. It does everything I want it to and doesn't do anything more, and the configuration files are quite easy to work with.I've been using alacritty as my terminal emulator mostly. It's pretty snappy and fast, works well with my HIDPI screen. Otherwise I use gnome-terminal or xfce term. For shell, I just use bash since I know it and it's everywhere.
I use
st, patched somewhat. I like it cuz it's fast. Not sure what else to say about it, a terminal emulator's a terminal emulator. My personal fork is here.second
stuser hereI've been using eshell quite a bit these days, though it's alternate hotkeys does take some getting used to. The main advantage is that it's very easy to manipulate the shell output without taking one's hands off of the keyboard.
When not using that, I usually use a bash shell within an emacs term. Advantage: You can run commands which capture the keyboard in char mode in the term, while still skipping back to an easily editable text mode. This is super useful if I'm working on someone else's environment and a command launches vi, for instance. It works just fine within the emacs term.
And when not using that, I'm pretty partial to konsole. It seems nicely configurable, tabbed and so forth. The 'nicely configurable' is mostly necessary when you make the mistake of trying to run linux on a 4K monitor, and suddenly all the assets are microscopic. I'm sure gnome-shell probably has similar advantages.
I'd love to hear more about how you use eshell. I'm a pretty avid emacs user, but I'm still not happy with using shells in emacs. There's a few disadvantages to eshell, and I've never found much advantage. It's nice to be able to lisp in it, and tramp support is cute (not much of a tramp user myself), but then I find I can't pipe or redirect things and I'm back to opening a standalone terminal emulator.
How does eshell help you?
I think the biggest advantage is the lack of friction when popping back and forth between buffers. I tend to split my window numerous ways, typically with a few buffers containing subfiles of the program I'm working on and an eshell to execute tests. Eshell allows you to easily hop back and forth without having to shift from line to char mode, which I constantly forget to do when I'm using terminal mode.
So I suppose that might be faint praise, but I've found it to be well worth dealing with eshell's other eccentricities.
That's fair, and I will use it for similar things... But I guess often I find having a quake-style terminal works better for hoping back and forth with these kind of things.
Normally rxvt-unicode, but for now i'm using the kde terminal.
Whatever the default for the desktop environment I have to use is. I don't care much about terminal emulators as long as they allow me to scroll back and open quick enough. If I ever need advanced features (like split screen) I use tmux.
URXVT here. I have always used it. I have dabbled with st and Termite but I always return to URXVT for some reason.
I use
urxvt, together withtmuxandzsh, with the Tamzen font and the palette from this gist.I don't even remember why
urxvtanymore, it has been years since I set it up. I was probably just looking for a lightweight terminal emulator, andurxvtseemed reasonable enough.I don't use any shell frameworks for
zsh, I just wrote my own.zshrcfrom scratch, and the result is both anemic and kinda messy, but I'm used to it by now.I use Konsole, specifically TDE's version, on a pretty daily basis. It's very configurable and themeable and integrates well with the desktop, you can do things like right click in a Konqueror (file manager) window and click "Open terminal here", and it pops one right up. Super handy.
I use tcsh as my shell, which I know is suboptimal, but I've had a customized .tcshrc file for many years now and porting it would be rather a pain. I very rarely run into instances where I need bash, and usually then I just switch to bash, run the command, and switch back. Someday I'll port my config...
The best thing is the little bottom terminal that appears when pressing F4 in Dolphin. When you go to another folder, it goes together with you! And if you cd to another folder, Dolphin does the same.
It's pure magic.
What!? This is a revelation...
If you want to port your config, you might as well port it to zsh.
yakuake or bust
Gnome Terminal. I've tried a few others, but they all have ugly fonts (in my opinion) or usability issues (problems with tabs, colors, resizing...). Gnome terminal also has the very nice notification for when a command ends in a background tab. A very nice productivity booster :)
On my Mac, iterm2. On Linux, terminology.
The one thing I didn't like about Kitty is it didn't support some fonts that I liked, and the author was really adamant about not ever doing so. In retrospect, a silly reason to leave a terminal, so if I switch again, I'll probably switch back to Kitty.
Xfce Terminal and suckless terminal
I use Alacritty with zsh. I like Alacritty mostly because it's fast. I don't use oh-my-zsh as it's terribly slow.
iterm2 with bash. I had fish running on it for a while, but never got really into it, so I switched back
Windows: So far I've been pretty happy with Windows Terminal (Preview) going directly into WSL/Ubuntu with OhMyZSH.
I'm late to the party but since nobody already mentioned it:
I'm using Terminator with zsh with zim (with pure prompt). This combination is the more functional, fastest and pretty I could found.