I’m looking for a new terminal. What’s your favorite one and why? Which one is popular?

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 months ago

    My favorite is Alacritty but I don’t use it because of stability issues lol. Kitty is popular now. It seems to have some questionable update policy but it’s fixable. It supports plugins (kittens), tabs and most of the common features. Though the configuration is done in a text file. It doesn’t have a GUI for it. For that I’d recommend Konsole

    • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Most things in Linux are configured via text files. It’s one of the main principles of Linux; store configs in plain text files. Saves us from having to use awful tooling like that of the windows registry. Even most GUI config settings are just manipulating a text file under the hood.

        • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Well yeah. But would you rather a GUI that stores the settings in easy to read and manipulate plain text files; Linux, or an archaic GUI that manipulates raw data and often breaks and is hard to understand; Windows registry.
          Even if you prefer GUIs, you’d probably still want the data stored in plain text files for the sake of simplicity and consistency.

    • F04118F@feddit.nl
      0·
      8 months ago

      I agree that Konsole are Kitty are both lovely terminals that are very configurable. Kitty for text file people vim enthusiasts and Konsole for GUI lovers.

      By “questionable update policy”, do you mean that it is updated by the package manager when installed from official repositories but it has an auto-updater functionality for users installing it manually?

      IIRC someone who compiled from source but didn’t set the flag/config to disable the auto-updater was surprised about that.

      I don’t see the big deal of it to be honest. The vast majority of users will be installing through the package manager. If you compile from source, you can decide yourself whether you want it to auto-update. The whole point of compiling from source is the extra control, not the defaults, I’d guess. Unless you don’t know what you are doing and the package was not available for your distro and in that case, enabling auto-update by default even serves that user group.

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
        0·
        8 months ago

        It’s more about the fact that the Kitty’s developer rudely and aggressively refused to disable automatic updates after a ton of requests. Some people just don’t use certain software if they don’t like the developer

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
        0·
        8 months ago

        I can’t remember all of them but now I have a weird issue that when I open Alacritty there’s some loading going on in the background for quite a few seconds which I can even see on the cursor (I think it’s “xdg” that’s loading) and even reinstalling the system didn’t help

        • Elsie@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Oh I think I know what you mean. Did you try setting your shell to something like sh instead of bash or zsh and see if it was a shell startup issue?

            • Elsie@lemmy.mlEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              And your default shell is a POSIX compliant shell, usually dash or ash, so that’s what I mean by sh. You can set it in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml with:

              [shell]
program = "/bin/sh"
  • okamiueru@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    Alacritty, launching tmux with fish shell. The latter shell could easily have been zsh. But a good and fast terminal w/tmux is such a nice thing to have.

    Any time to wish you had bothered with tmux, is when it’s already too late. If you go for this, you’ll never look back.

      • okamiueru@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 months ago

        Don’t know why you were downvoted. In any case, all terminals can be configured to start with a specific command and arguments. So, depending on your terminal, you might need to read the documentation, and/or search the web.

        In alacritty config, this is:

        shell:
  program: <CMD>
  args:
    - <ARGS>

        Then one of these:

        1. <CMD> is the path to tmux, and you have configured tmux to run the shell of your choice. Search the web for how.
        2. <CMD> is the path to your shell, and it supports launching in tmux. Search the web for how.

        For me, it’s the second one. I use fish, and I launch it with fish --command=tmux. So the above config looks like this:

        shell:
  program: /usr/bin/fish
  args:
    - --command=tmux
  • wyclif@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 months ago

    I’ve tried a lot of them over the whole history of Linux, but what I use now is kitty.