alacritty
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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I primarily use Alacritty. I spend quite a lot of time running things that produce ludicrous amounts of output (eg. compiling Android from source). Out of 10 or so terminal emulators I've tested earlier this year, it was the only one that didn't use 100% CPU displaying all that output, staying in the low single digits.
I'd prefer to use Wezterm because I like its lua configuration system and the builtin pane splitting, but with my workload, I still run into issues where its CPU usage shoots to 100% and becomes non-responsive for a while. (That said, it's already a lot better than before. I try to report any issues I can reliably reproduce and Wez has been wonderful about fixing them.)
It really does not make sense a terminal consuming 100% CPU, so Alacrittycis my choice as well
Alacritty + tmux!
I use foot together with foot-server. The client opens in less than a millisecond, and I usually have tens of terminal windows open at the same time. Tabbing comes from the window manager.
And it's pretty customizable, without UI stuff. Just pure config files, my favorite.
When I'm using a tiling window manager, I use kitty, because I like its speed and support for font ligatures. When I'm using a Desktop Environment like Gnome or KDE I usually don't use the terminal at all, but if I need it, I use the default emulator.
Sorry for the off-topic question, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around basic linux concepts: you use "tiling window manager" and "desktop environment" as if they were mutually exclusive options. What's the relationship between them?
Thanks!
I don't know if I'm correct, but in my head, a window manager JUST manages windows. Gnome and KDE also manage windows, but they also contain applications for settings, printing, etc. Desktop Environments also have window managers, but they have more applications on top.
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Window Managers manage windows as the name suggests and control how they are displayed and interacted with. A window manager is one component of a desktop environment which provides other facilities like compositors, task bars, status trays, task switchers, configuration applets, virtual desktops, and perhaps some default applications for basic things like terminal, file management, text editing, connection management, and image viewing. Some desktop environments feature extensive plug-in systems ( extensions ) and vast application ecosystems.
In the early days of Linux, there were no “desktop environments” and you would run a window manager directly over the window server ( eg. X11 ) with applications running directly over the WM. Proprietary UNIX introduced desktop environments like CDE, OpenWindows, and NeXTstep but, as they were proprietary, Linux lacked them. This changed with the advent of KDE and GNOME soon after. These days, the vast majority of Linux users are working with a desktop environment ( probably still one of these two though there are now others ).
A timing window manager in particular is a window manager that allows auto arranging and resizing applications to share the screen ( typically using keyboard commands ). The goal of a tiling window manager is that application views do not overlap and that the full desktop space is used efficiently. A floating window manager in contrast allows windows to overlap and leaves positioning, resizing, visibility, and focus up to the user. The desktop itself may be plainly visible and may even have clickable icons or applets displayed on it. Interaction with windows in a floating window manager is usually done with the mouse. Windows and Mac are examples of the floating metaphor so that is the one most of us are more familiar with. Any given window manager can incorporate both floating and tiling ideas and features but most WMs lean pretty heavily one way or the other.
Technically, a window manager is just a special kind of application. In X11, it is not even required. You can run applications directly without one but, if you run more than one application, you will quickly understand the value of a window manager. The value of a full desktop environment is more a matter of preference. Most people welcome them or consider them essential. Others see DEs as bloat. The middle ground is assembling a desktop experience yourself from a group of applications you select for that purpose from the window manager up.
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Gnome terminal. I don't really care the terminal emulator. What's in the terminal is what's important. The terminal window just needs to be able to resize correctly though.
Same here - it comes with Gnome distros by default so nothing to install. I keep all the default settings except for disabling the annoying bell.
I use Kitty, because it works well on both X and Wayland, and is GPU accelerated. For some reason, Alacritty doesn't display the fonts properly (Displays them much smaller on Wayland. Only program I have such issues with)
Also Kitty is more widely packaged (for example on Debian based distros)
Yakuake, I can't use anything other than a quake based terminal. Because of my work I need 24/7 quick access to a terminal, yakuake is just that
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Anything, but with tmux running inside. You can copy text even in a tty, split the terminal window, detach from and attach to tmux sessions, etc. I will never use a terminal for any moderately complex task without tmux again :)
i never got the copy part right, what configs are you using?
also, can you copy from a remote (ssh) tmux?
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Kitty has awesome framerates, easily hitting 90fps pushing 150k - 180k per frame. Alacrity is also dope.
Personally I've been using gnome-terminal for quite a while and was fairly happy except that I needed to maintain gnome-terminal and libvte patches to get notification support. Having some sort of notification when a long-running command completes is very important to my productivity.
I've been using Konsole but not fully happy.
- No hyperlink support.
- Selection is lost when my prompt updates (I have the time so that I know when I have started commands).
I've been looking at other options but none-of them feel quite right.
Alacritty:
- No unlimited scrollback.
Kitty:
- Selection bug with updating prompt.
- No unlimited scrollback.
Wezterm:
- No unlimited scrollback.
Terminator:
- Has this terminal group bar that I can't get rid of.
- No notification support.
I realize that I am probably going to have to make a compromise (probably just go back to gnome-terminal with patches) but I figured it would be interesting to see what everyone else was using and make sure I didn't miss something.
To me the important features are:
- Unlimited scrollback.
- Notification support (ideally with the 777 Notify command, but if the terminal bell can make a notification that is fine).
- Clean UI. (I don't use tabs so need to be able to hide the tab bar)
- Hyperlink support.
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I like my kitty
urxvt. It works good enough and doesn't use much memory.
This is what i use as well.
I'm using foot since I've installed sway and it's just fine ..not a super user to evaluate well
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st is good enough for my needs. I use tmux for multiplexing, scrollback, and tabs
TMUX is life. Before, I was fighting screen to do what I needed. TMUX just does it and the customisation puts it way above. I can't imagine working on the command line without TMUX.
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Alacritty for me
Alacritty is great, but I switched to wezterm due to ligatures support
I use black box flatpak.
While y'all here:
is there a terminal emulator that has "modern" text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z...
Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character..
“modern” text entry controls... Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del ...
Those are not really features of the terminal emulator but of the shell. I don't think a terminal emulator can coerce bash or zsh or whatever to do those things unless it acts as some kind of proxy between your text editing buffer and the shell, which would probably lead to its own set of complications. The thing you want would have to be a combination of a GUI terminal program and its own shell.
For bash, I suggest you read up on readline keyboard shortcuts, which can do many of the text editing tricks that you are asking. The shortcuts are different than what you are used to on Windows, and there's no concept of "selecting" text, but for terminal applications it's pretty much the standard way text input is handled on Linux.
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Kitty with catppuccin and 50%-ish transparency. Works like a charm. And also if you add something like what kitti3 does (look it up on github), will be even better.
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Anything that supports solarized dark and solarized light theming. It is so much less eyestrain
I really like wezterm, mainly because it's configured in Lua and you can easily disable all keyboard shortcuts and allow only the ones you want. I do everything in Tmux, so my only shortcut s are for changing font size and full-screening window.
Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as "A high-end terminal for low-end systems".
I love wezterm, primarily because it is cross platform. The most important factor to me is being able to use the same one on Windows, Mac and Linux, because I use all three on a regular basis and don't want to maintain multiple configs. However, wezterm currently has a bug that prevents it from opening on Wayland+Nvidia which forces me to use something else on Linux. None of the other ones get close imo.
I rather enjoy Tilix. It can tile a single tab without tmux and it can also give special handling to links matched from regexps. I use it to go from Python stacktraces to correct line in Emacs with just a click. It can also do Quake-like terminal, which I use alot.
The project is looking for maintainers, though, so it's possible at some point I need to start looking for alternatives..
Wezterm, which does everything, with a great developer behind it.
Second choice is Konsole: super solid and great rendering.
Aaand tmux with either of those.
Tilix
Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.
Xterm is fine and everywhere.
I really love Tabby
Tabs, CMD, SSH, Powershell... all included. It has multiple profiles, can be used portable, has themes and Integrations, like one for Docker
Never need anything else imo 😊
The thing that I love about Linux is choice. To me, Tabby sounds terrible, but I'm glad that it has a community behind it to give people that choice. Whatever works for you!
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St, Xterm, Terminator - depends on hardware and os.
I'm most comfortable when my window manager and terminal emulator are well integrated and keyboard centric.
St
st. LukeSmithxyz's fork specifically.
Terminology, with the Nyan Cat cursor! ^.^ :3
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