Which terminal emulator do you use?

kitty. it's the first thing I install on a new machine.

alacritty

Konsole

I don't know the difference between a terminal and a terminal emulator, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

Lately using Foot since that's what my distro shipped with.

Foot!

Wezterm. I love some of it's features (quick search).

Terminator.

I use the broadcast, zoom, grouping, and the guake/yakuake style dropdown. Also it has layout switching like xmonad, ie you can ctrl + space to cycle pane layouts.

Kitty. Fast (GPU-accelerated), Wayland-compatible, and has a built-in image viewer, among other things.

Alacritty (with tmux if I need a multiplexor)

Foot if you're on Wayland, alacritty if you're not.

Konsole does everything I need it to.

Gnome terminal

Alacritty

No particular reason why. It's fast, it works, and I've already got it configured how I like it.

I've used kitty and a couple others. It really doesn't make much difference to me tbh.

wezterm. Works great on wayland and the documentation is amazing. And it's built in rust if you're one of those people.

Kitty, because I like it more than the KDE and GNOME terminals, and I prefer native multiplexing

I like yakuake, I'm spoiled by the drop-down terminal at this point

I use wezterm on wayland. It has built in tabs so its better than just using another window or tmux imo

st. It just works. I'm always opening and closing terminals, and 90% of the stuff I use have's a TUI. st launches before I can even notice, under 4GB of RAM, and the entire install is less than a MiB.

I'm partial to a bit of Tilix personality.

Alacritty, no particular reason. It's fast and I already made it look how I want so there is no reason to switch.

So Konsole rocks. Yakuake a great addition. But I'm a big KDE fanboy

Alacritty is also pretty fun, combined with openbox / LXDE

But for the $dayjob it's Windows Terminal which is easily the best thing Microsoft has released in decades when combined with WSL

Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me

Kitty for both X and Wayland - I like the customization (as in I already have the config file that I have backed up and can just plop it in), it works perfectly on any VM (used it on sway, hyprland, i3, awesomewm), though honestly I don't see much of a difference between the terminal emulators. There's literally no wrong choice or meaningful difference in my experience at least, but admittedly I just use a terminal emulator to run commands, neovim and system file editing.

Konsole and Yakuake... It's sufficient

No love for Terminator?

I spend my day working on it. Multiple tabs, multiple vertical and horizontal panes, good keyboard shortcuts, profiles, themes... What more do you want?

Gnome Terminal. I've tried out a few others, but at this point I'm kind of partial to just using the default with good integration with the rest of the desktop. Pop, in this case. I'm curious if they'll adopt something else for the terminal in COSMIC.

Edit: They just recently announced COSMIC Terminal, so that's a yes. I look forward to trying it out. It's based on alacritty's framework.

I use WezTerm. Highly configurable and supports every image display protocol under the sun.

Big fan of kitty for font ligatures support and how splits/tabs work

Kitty, but I don't have any particular reason it's just there and it works

I'm high AF and new to Linux, what is a terminal emulator?

whatever ship with the distro when I want to open a terminal...

Konsole and yakuake as the drop down for quick tasks

rxvt-unicode with tabbedex.

I refuse to use a terminal emulator that needs more than 100MB of RAM to display 80x24 green text on a black display

I like the slide-down ones so Guake or ddterm (a Gnome shell extension). I always remap caps lock to control and the “Caps Lock” + tilde shortcut to get to the terminal is such a part of my muscle memory that I think I’d lose my mind trying to change at this point.

st

Alacritty (with screen if I need a multiplexor)

Konsole, but only because I'm on Plasma. I really don't rven like it that much, but... well, it's a terminal, it does terminal things so I'm more than OK with it.

On xfce, I would youse xfce-terminal.

anything is fine as long as basic stuff works - like ctrl/shift+insert (tho it's a thing I had to manually setup in Konsole 😅)

Alacritty in case Konsole breaks

I use what the DE usually provides, which is Konsole in Plasma. I don't need fancy stuff as I only do basic stuff in the terminal.

Kitty as I need X11 support & I use the kittens it comes with too. Kinda which more applications used their drawing API to get images on the screen.

No love for xfce4-terminal around here?

st

#1, whatever is default. The main advantage of the terminal is that it's just a terminal, fundamentally the same terminal since the dawn of computing.

Having said that, I do sometimes install a non-default terminal. I haven't seen any of them mentioned:

cool-retro-term It looks like an OG CRT! What other terminal emulator has this killer feature?

Byobu Technically a front end for tmux, but it gives some useful status info and multiple windows.

I don't care much for the terminal, but I noticed that I care a lot about my shell and the tools I use in it.

And the prompt - can't live without my ASCII bling-blink.

Black box. If you use Gnome, highly recommended.

Usually what ever best integrates with the DE (which is usually the default) but when that one sucks I fallback to Konsole

Terminal is to much bloat. Use tty. /s

Contour currently, but might consider that new one by the cosmic team. Contour is a bit minimalistic like alacritty or foot, yet it ligatures (a weird dealbreaker of mine). Goes well with zellij (pretty neat stuff, if u ask me, although breaking sixel is unfortunate, but they're working on it).

Used to use kitty and weztetm, the latter was overall less confusing (generally faster, no need to use quirks for ssh). And then wezterm broke on Wayland :D

Can't live without Yakuake/Guake

I use kitty because its the hyprland default.

Kitty the vast majority of the time but slowly using Ghostty more and more as it improves. Sometimes use Tabby and have been looking into Wave recently. I also use the x-terminal-reloaded package in the Pulsar editor for a dock terminal if im doing something in it at the same time.

Tmux for life

Yakuake

XFCE's. TERMIMAL set to linux, because something sets it to xterm, which does weird shit.

Kitty

xterm on X11 (urxvt is also good but no true color support), foot on wayland

Formerly I used Terminator, because I liked to split the screen. Then I moved to Kitty because having a GPU-powered terminal sound amazing, and now I'm using gnome-terminal because I'm trying to get back to simply and default.

xfce4-terminal - because it's easy to config, I like tabs, and it has good Unicode support.

konsole

Tilix

Back when I was into tiling window managers and all that i’d use urxvt but now i just use gnome terminal. I can theme it nicely and it works well

I primarily just use whatever the distro has(gnome terminal most often), though I use iTerm2 with omz on my work MacBook and really enjoy the customizability with tabs, panes, hotkeys, and especially triggers.

Can anyone recommend a good equivalent on Linux?

I see a lot of others listed here with many features. I'm open to trying a few to find a good alternative, though I don't want to move all my eggs to a basket only to find out it doesn't support some feature.

Foot and alacrity

Foot terminal on wayland, wezterm on MacOS

I was an rxvt/urxvt fan for nearly 20 years, then Alacritty for a while. Nowadays, I just use gnome-terminal and I've been happy with it. Looking forward to trying Prompt though.

5 days later: Prompt is the bee's knees! Highly recommend for anyone wanting a snappy, feature-rich GTK4 terminal, especially if you work with containers.

I like st and kitty depending on the task

Konsole

On GNOME, I like BlackBox, though Prompt looks promising once it's stable.

whatever comes with the distro I'm using this month

Same here whatever the DE has I would use.

Though most common answers from others would be alacritty or kitty which I see the use but feels advanced in configuration.

Konsole and xterm, although I haven't had to use xterm in a while. Actually, circa 1997 I used kterm, the predecessor to konsole. ;)

Straight up Linux ttys are also quite common for me. Most old school distros still let you escape to the terminal, with CTRL-ALT-F1 or similar. I haven't distro hopped in a long time, so I don't know if other distros still do this.

I'm partial to terminator

I use Yakuake most of the time. It's a Quake-style drop down terminal thats always available. I find it to be convenient for the vast majority of the terminal stuff I do.

When I need to edit long files or something, tho, I usually use Kitty, since the quake-style terminals tend to get in the way sometimes lol. It's not really a unique thing to Kitty or anything, but I like how you can split one window into multiple terminals.

Sakura. I recently did a little survey of what was on hand for Debian Stable, and that's the one I liked best. The most important thing to me is right-click paste, because I do that incessantly.

Gnome terminal, although I am on xfce. Easy to configure, has tabs and shortcuts. I am using terminal for 90 % of my work.

I like Mate-Terminal; it's nicely customizable for my tastes and does the basics well. I also quite like LXTerminal for similar reasons.

But generally I use Konsole as I'm using KDE a lot now, and it's the default terminal.

Kitty, although I was using Alacritty until last week. I got an update that had a bug related to launching Alacritty full screen. I’m in a terminal all day so I couldn’t be bothered with it. I installed kitty and adapted my configuration pretty easily. I can’t tell the difference between them except for the icon.

I was using alacritty for a long time, but I swapped to kitty recently when I started using Wayland

Konsole for regular stuff, kitty for neovim.

rxvt-unicode - lightweight and nearly perfect, and one of the few that handles fonts well.

i used to love konsole because of the blur and the tabs but now i use alacritty

I just use GNOME console. Looks good and I'm not missing anything.

st. Fonts look great and I've even been able to add a vim mode for scrollback including selecting and copying text.

If I need something fast( usually on a new system) that's in most distros repos and automatically installs all it's dependencies( and doesn't have to many like gnome terminal and konsole) I tend to use sakura, though xfce terminal is also pretty good.

I keep a Gnome Shell instance always running with a Screen session. However, what I actually use to run CLI commands is Emacs Shell, built-in to Emacs.

Emacs Shell has most of the bells and whistles you get from things like Fish shell. So I like to use Dash, a minimal POSIX shell that is much lighter weight than Bash, Zsh, or Fish. Dash provides no features -- no tab completion, no history, no line editing -- and I have Emacs add all of those features on top of Dash for me. It is amazing what a good, scriptable terminal emulator can accomplish.

Emacs Shell can be scripted using the same scripting language it uses to script the editor, file browser, window manager, and everything else. So you can script the shell to search for regular expressions and make things clickable with the mouse, or only display portions of output, creating simple interactive views around shell commands. You can bind certain click buttons or keystrokes in the editor or file manager to run shell commands in new windows. You can script the shell with "expect"-like behavior (automatically input responses to certain prompts). You can capture and collate the output of multiple commands running in parallel.

There are a small number of terminal emulators I would be happy to use as daily drivers and most of them have been named here but my default is kitty. It supports everything I need and a lot I don't and doesn't have any showstoppers. All the modern terminal implementations are performant enough. I used real terminals like vt-100s and vt-220s. Everything we have today is awesome by comparison. We fetishize performance and features too much. Once you have something that works there isn't much reason to change IMO.

I'm using the ddterm gnome extension, and it's been the best I've tried so far. Lots of customization, very few bugs, and does exactly what you need it to with no bells or whistles to distract you.

Konsole and Alacritty when in Hyprland

I like Guake for drop down, WezTerm for everything else. I do miss iTerm2 on Linux tho, but it's close enough.

Konsole, because I can use it in editor(Kate), file manager(Dolphin), IDE(KDevelop), standalone window and Quake style window.

MinTTY in Windows (for git bash) and whatever the default is in Debian

I use 3. I never use anything integrated into an IDE for some reason, never started and probably never will.

Yakuake as drop down terminal 90%
Black box for nice looking full screen terminal for full screen.
Dolphin with emulator on bottom for niche things

If I could only have one for the rest of my life I'd be torn between Yakuake and Konsole. I love Konsole though, used it for years and is all round great for sticking with the DE aesthetics and integrating with themes.

I've used alacritty for ages, its lack of ui is appealing on a tiling wm and it is as performant as i need it to be

Tilda, because I like how you can bring it down the screen anytime with one button.

For those kitty users, have anyone been able to use fonts not in the list kitty support? I only use Terminus (OTB) fonts on terminal, and when trying kitty out, I found no way to get it to use Terminus (I could only select between those supported by kitty).

uxterm because fast.

eterm because I'm old skool. now get off my lawn.

xfce4-terminal has always been my go-to terminal. It may not be the lightest or the best, but it does have some neat built-in features like opening a drop-down window....

Termius because somehow I glitched the free trial for like 8 months and love having all the hosts saved and synced across devices. The android app is pretty damn slick. Can save frequent commands and has a password clipboard thing, probably not the right way to describe it. That said, if I'm just opening a local sesh on my Pop!_OS desktop I use the bundled one for that.