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Favorite Terminal Emulator

I have recently jumped head first into the Linux space. I've installed Arch on my daily driver and I've become overwhelmed/overjoyed with my options. I'd like to hear from the community about your Linux favorites.

What is your favorite Terminal Emulator and what have you done to customize it?

110 comments
  • Gnome Terminal when I'm in GNOME, Konsole when I'm in KDE, and plain old xterm for i3 and any other WM. These just feel like they fit just right into their respective DE/WM.

  • Boring answer, but I just use gnome-terminal with a nord theme. I also remove the menu and scroll bars, and add some internal padding.

    The only other thing I do, is I use tdrop so I can have a "scratchpad" or dropdown terminal that I can toggle with gnome-terminal.

  • Gnome Console since it is consistent with the rest of Gnome and works well enough.

  • I'm another Alacritty user. It's been my daily driver for years at this point and I have no complaints

  • I don't really have a preference for a specific TE. As long as the default background is black. And not something close to black but not quite. And as long as Ctrl-Shift-V is paste.

  • On regular desktop environments I really like Guake - it’s a drop down terminal emulator similar to how old games used to do it. It’s nice for quick use here and there. Though these days I just run tilling wm with xfce-terminal. It gets the job done and still looks good.

    • Omg. I thought I might read the whole comment list and not see anyone else using guake. I was starting to think something was wrong with it. I've used it for years, and for my very simple needs, it just works. And I like that it's always there when I need it, hides away when I don't.

  • Mlterm because it's the only low latency terminal with modern features.

  • I've used xterm, rxvt, kitty, and now alacritty. I like alacritty because it's fast and simple. The only thing I don't like is that the default color scheme is off. If you run tmux in something like xterm, the bar is green. But in the default alacritty, it looks more yellow.

    So I have this in my ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml:

     undefined
        
    # XTerm's default colors
    colors:
       # Default colors
       primary:
         background: '#000000'
         foreground: '#d8d8d8'
       # Normal colors
       normal:
         black:   '#000000'
         red:     '#cd0000'
         green:   '#00cd00'
         yellow:  '#cdcd00'
         blue:    '#0000ee'
         magenta: '#cd00cd'
         cyan:    '#00cdcd'
         white:   '#e5e5e5'
    
       # Bright colors
       bright:
         black:   '#7f7f7f'
         red:     '#ff0000'
         green:   '#00ff00'
         yellow:  '#ffff00'
         blue:    '#5c5cff'
         magenta: '#ff00ff'
         cyan:    '#00ffff'
         white:   '#ffffff'
    
    
      
  • Depends what I'm doing, where and how. I do use tmux everywhere though but at home xfce-terminal, At work I tend to use terminator for the wonders of group control but if connecting from a windows pc i'll be on windows-terminal.

    For shell I try to use zsh everywhere with p10k and omz.

110 comments