So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
+1 for kitty. Embedded images for Ranger is super cool. The only downside is i’ve been getting rendering issues for a couple seconds after waking up from suspend but that’s probably a configuration issue on my end
Konsole and Kitty are objectively better than alacrity. So it’s a question of which of those to use. Konsole if you use the Breeze application style, and Kitty if you don’t. Konsole has the best keybinds and it actually has a scrollbar, but kitty doesn’t require breeze.
Konsole doesn’t require Breeze. It’s themable, like most KDE applications. It does ship with a Breeze terminal color scheme, but that’s just the default. Many more are available out of the box and creating new ones is easy.
QT apps don’t look right without breeze imo
I have been using Terminator for years now, because you can easily slice and dice the window into several terminals, and it is reasonably configurable. But then, as I am completely happy with it, I never ventured out to find an even better one, so YMMV.
since you seem to consider alacritty, which is pretty minimal in features, maybe give foot a shot as well. i find it fits best into tiling wm land (sway, river, etc.) so might not be your cup of tea…
Been using foot for like 5 years now. It just gels so damn well with tiling wms and super fast.
what does it better than any other terminal for twms?
It does pretty much nothing in terms of fancy windowing and layout features. No tab interface, split screens, etc. I let those handled by my TWM and it just starts really fast.
I use i3 and don’t have a mouse. Rn I’m using Alacritty because I want to keep things minimal. Is foot a good fit for my usecase?
not sure for i3, i think foot is wayland-only. but i have the same setup with sway and am very happy
Tillix with zellji is golden
Isn’t that overkill?
KDE user so I use Konsole. It’s great.
Kitty but only if you don’t mind configuring everything in a config file. It has GPU acceleration so it will be faster than Konsole when showing 300+ lines of output on older hardware. Alacritty had a lot of issues on my installations so can’t recommend it
I’m just curious, when do I have to care about virtual terminal speed? When do you need that GPU acceleration?
From my experience, you only really need it when you want to get a lot of output (try find /). In my cases it’s more than 2 times faster on GPU accelerated terminal emulators. And I believe you can’t display images on non-accelerated ones
Just tried “time tree ~” and “time fd .mkv /” in alacrity and konsole. Konsole was actually beating it by fractions of a second in most runs. Alacritty was only slightly faster at treeing after a few runs.
It’s always faster after a few runs. But in my case it’s like 10 seconds faster. Though I have an old HDD so maybe that’s the reason lol
On Cosmic you can tile multiple windows in tabs. Tabs are essential for me, I tried Alacritty (and it had quite some issues but I got it to work) and switched back to Konsole
I can’t recommend kitty enough it’s really great!
Tilix
For me that’s the one, even though I’ve also been using KDE plasma for the better part of the past ten years. Very configurable, going as far as to have an option to disable CSD. It also looks like a proper modern app without being dumbed down.
Kitty - super simple, configurable and lightweight
Also you can export your client list, which is helpful when migrating from machine to machine
TLDR: try them out, see what you like. It’s a relatively easy switch-out, it’s not like you’re debating different web stacks.
I used zutty for awhile. It was fine and lightweight, but broke when I switched back from the nvidia drivers to nouveau (it’s an older laptop that has no reason to milk every last bit of performance out of its gpu).
Now I’m using Alacritty. I like that I can configure it in a
.ymlfile instead of needing to use my mouse, I like that it’s written in Rust, I like that I got it to do transparency within minutes. I love the vi mode.On my daily driver I use Terminator. I like the multiplexing/tabs/panes, the infinite scrollback when needed, and the logger plugin when needed. I might see if I can get it to do transparency tomorrow.
xterm has always treated me well too. Just a good, solid choice.
I guess my two biggest pieces of advice re: terminal emulators are
-
use tmux, it’s extremely convenient once you get the hang of it. It’s like any terminal-based text editor: hard to learn, but such a pleasure to use once you’ve got it down. Why waste time moving over to grab your mouse when you could just hit 2-3 keys?
-
configure the hell out of whatever you pick. It doesn’t feel comfortable, like it’s your command line—in the same way that it’s your bed, or your chair, or your computer—until you’ve configured it. After you do, it just feels comfortable. Change the color scheme to all custom colors, change the font, change the shell, change the sounds, change the cursor blink rate, disable cursor, disable animations, disable text output, enable scrollback, enable logging, enable transparency, enable autopilot, adjust the retro encabulator, fasten your seatbelts, eat your veggies, stay in school.
-
use transparency. There’s just something so pleasant about something more than a solid color background.
-
xfce4-terminal. Runs fine without xfce4.
konsole is fast and reliableI like it
