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DevelopmentUtilitiesLinuxTerminalConsoleCommand Prompt

What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

49
Options 
Considered
2.5K
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Jan 28, 2023
Last 
Updated
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The Best 2 of 41 OptionsWhy?

Best Linux terminal emulatorsPriceFont LigaturesConfigurable
92
rxvt-unicode
---
91
kitty
---
89
Alacritty
-NoYes, via automatically reloading YAML configuration file
89
st
---
88
Terminator
---
See Full List
92
Excellent

rxvt-unicode

My Recommendation for rxvt-unicode

My Recommendation for rxvt-unicode

Add Video or Image
All
31
Experiences
10
Pros
11
Cons
10
mccauls7
Callixtus
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Low memory usage

Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM. See More
mccauls7
Saul Pwanson
Top Con
•••

Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped

If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge. See More
ResponsiblePistis
ResponsiblePistis's Experience
I love this terminal. I've used many terminals over the years, and I always come back to a few. "Whatever is already installed on the distro I'm using at the moment." simply because it's already there. "st", because even though you have to compile it to configure it, I believe in the suckless.org projects and feel like the single small source file C program is very nice "rxvt-unicode" because it seems to be the best. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Callixtus
Top Pro
•••

Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage

For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Eric Mrak
Top Con
•••

Requires work to look acceptable

Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding. See More
cosmo
cosmo's Experience
It's light, simple, reliable, and it stays out of your way. It's also incredibly customizable. It's the way a terminal should be. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Supports terminal transparency

Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability. See More
ideasman42
Top Con
•••

Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)

See More
SharpPostverta
SharpPostverta's Experience
Although I want better fallback fonts (and no font clipping where it can be helped) and 24-BIT TRUE COLOR SUPPORT (cough), I think urxvt is a great terminal, and I use it every day. See More
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

Minimum dependencies and simple text config

See More
wollington
SpiritedVidarr
Top Con
•••

In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET. See More
Brenton Horne
Brenton Horne's Experience
Was challenging to figure out how to configure it to my liking, but I eventually found a configuration that worked for me. I'm not sure if it uses less RAM than XTerm, in fact based on ps_mem tests I've done XTerm sometimes outperforms urxvt and vice-versa. Personally, I do not think it has any real significant advantages over XTerm, unless you're a Perl programmer, but nor is it any worse than XTerm. The only, fair insignificant advantage that urxvt has, is it is in the repos of Solus, a distro without XTerm in its repos. Although, both terminal emulators are in the official repos of almost every other popular distro. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Supports multiple font types

Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode. See More
Laura Kyle
Saul Pwanson
Top Con
•••

Unicode rendering is buggy

There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling. See More
Air Dedman
Air Dedman's Experience
Old and doesn't do as well as Kitty or even alacritty. Not sure if is usable on Wayland yet either. See More
Monika
InhabitableExoplanet
RationalMacCecht
Top Pro
•••

Handles bold text colour properly

Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs. See More
DignifiedYopaat
Top Con
•••

Bloated

Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all. See More
AuthenticJavine
AuthenticJavine's Experience
Faster than kitty in loading time . See More
Pablo Lalloni
Top Pro
•••

High performance

Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives. See More
Endi Sukaj
mccauls7
Slimothy
Top Con
•••

No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here. See More
HonorableCelaeno
HonorableCelaeno's Experience
don't work See More
mccauls7
Bryan
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Unicode support

International language support is provided through Unicode. See More
Endi Sukaj
Alexander Sheremet
Top Con
•••

Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands: $ function fontsize {printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"} $ fontsize 22 See More
IntuitiveMacGreine
IntuitiveMacGreine's Experience
So light! See More
SpiritedVidarr
Top Pro
•••

Proper wrapping support

During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping. See More
Laura Kyle
Marco Paganini
Top Con
•••

No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor. See More
Archived
Archived's Experience
Simple, internal border, and pixmap support (pixbuf). See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Zack H
Top Pro
•••

Fast text rendering

Rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time. See More
Slimothy
Alexander Sheremet
Top Con
•••

No way to change font size with a hotkey/scale event

See More
DignifiedYopaat
DignifiedYopaat's Experience
Bloated See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Built-in Perl interpreter

It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl. See More
HideSee All
91
Excellent

kitty

My Recommendation for kitty

My Recommendation for kitty

Add Video or Image
All
40
Experiences
12
Pros
19
Cons
9
Chloe Montanez
ImmaculateArke
Top Pro
•••

High-performance

Minimal perceived latency while typing, faster than most terminals. See More
Alex
Folât Pjêrsômêj
Top Con
•••

Very unique support issue with SSH

Kitty has SSH compatibility issues no other terminal I know of has. For every server Kitty NEEDS ncurses and python to be installed on that server or use a hack command in order for it to function. Kitty SSH, because kitty can not run on regular SSH, does not function otherwise. See More
PioneeringCicholGricenchos
PioneeringCicholGricenchos's Experience
Fast, image preview out of the box, and ligatures. Can handle 99% of the fonts out there. See More
Alex
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

True Color support

Supports True Color, so software like Vim can display a really nice pallet. See More
TranquilAscalaphus
Top Con
•••

Depends on Python

Fast but definitely not lightweight. See More
DeliberateTaneRore
DeliberateTaneRore's Experience
Turn off IME by default. Can't re-enable by a parameter option, but must be set with the system-level ENV. Italics in many fonts are cut off. See More
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

OpenGL for rendering

Offloads rendering work to the GPU for lower system load. See More
Simona
Jelle De Loecker
Top Con
•••

Everything has to be done via the keyboard

There's no preferences window for even the most basic settings and there's no right-click context menu. See More
cosmo
cosmo's Experience
This thing is FAST, man. I've never had a terminal feel so responsive. Not only that, this thing is loaded with customization options and plugins (adorably called "kittens"). I highly recommend this to anybody looking for a solid, performant, state-of-the-art terminal emulator. See More
ArtisticLamia
Top Pro
•••

Supports font ligatures

Properly renders font ligatures in fonts like Fira Code or Hasklig See More
Simona
DeliberateTaneRore
Top Con
•••

Minority issues will not be dealt with

Turns off IME by default. Can't re-enable by a parameter option, but must be set with the system-level ENV. Italics in many fonts are cut off. And also CJK fallback font rendering sucks. See More
CoherentKekui
CoherentKekui's Experience
feels fast / responsive / modern. had problems with urxvt before See More
DebonairChacUayabXoc
Top Pro
•••

Tries to move the state of terminal emulation forward

Adds protocol extensions for things like enhanced keyboard support, colored and styled underlines, graphics rendering, etc. See More
Alex
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Con
•••

Still new

Has no packages for a lot of main distros. See More
RobustTiamat
RobustTiamat's Experience
Glitchy See More
Erich Spaker
Top Pro
•••

Designed for Powerusers

Is keyboard focused, easily hackable, and minimal. Does one thing and does it well. See More
JM80
Timothy Bump
Top Con
•••

No support for Bitmap fonts

So if you like Proggy or another bitmap font for your terminal, you're out of luck. The developer has stated that bitmap fonts will not be supported due to their incompatibility with font resizing. See More
AuthenticJavine
AuthenticJavine's Experience
Easy to configure. Easy to use. See More
Alex
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

Multiple terminal windows

Supports tiling multiple terminal windows side by side in different layouts without needing to use an extra program like tmux. See More
UnbiasedFreyr
Top Con
•••

No centralized configuration

Each session holds its own configuration of all features. This means that if one wants to change a configuration common to all sessions (say, the terminal font), it has to be changed in each stored session separately. A better solution would be to have a default configuration and store only the changed elements for each session (both configurations would be merged, with e priority on the specific one). See More
HilariousBaalshamin
HilariousBaalshamin's Experience
Blazing Fast with the right configs, can leave alacritty far behind if configured well. Works well with high refresh rate screens and modern GPUs. Not a good idea for old hardware, might see tearing and bad font rendering on low end hardware if configured badly. Very easy to configure. See More
Alex
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

Unicode

Uses Unicode for the best character compatibility. See More
Simona
LearnedHannahannah
Top Con
•••

No tabbed sessions

No built in support for tabbed sessions. Requires an add on. See More
Jelle De Loecker
Jelle De Loecker's Experience
It's missing some features I really need, and having to do everything via the keyboard is a pain. See More
Monika
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

Cross-platform

Works on Linux and macOS. See More
JM80
CulturedFutsunushi
Top Con
•••

Some keys are not accepted

LANG1(a.k.a. Hangul) key simply doesn't work. For example, when using kinesis savant 2 footswitch for modifier keys, the ctrl key doesn't work either. (Weirdly, the shift key works). See More
ArtisticLamia
ArtisticLamia's Experience
Supports font ligatures, extremely fast, and sane defaults makes kitty hard to beat. See More
Monika
schlaumeier
Top Pro
•••

Open URLs in browser easily with keyboard

With Ctrl-Shift-e you get a numbered list of all URLs on the screen and you can select one by number with the keyboard to open it in the browser. See More
CourteousFides
CourteousFides's Experience
Went looking for a replacement for Gnome-Terminal, that keeps segfaulting on me. found Kitty and it simply always works! It is fast and very much adaptable. Also very nice is the possibility to use Tabs and different layouts. See More
CourteousFides
Top Pro
•••

Has Kittens

A framework for easily creating terminal programs that make use of its advanced features. See More
Adam Antoni Dobrowolski
Adam Antoni Dobrowolski's Experience
Easy to install and configure, just moved from xterm for font support and don't see any drawbacks. See More
Monika
Nickolay Mardanov
Top Pro
•••

Startup sessions

Support startup sessions which allow you to specify the window/tab layout, working directories and programs to run on startup. See More
ReceptiveHeXiangu
ReceptiveHeXiangu's Experience
Dev maintains poorly See More
Monika
schlaumeier
Top Pro
•••

Allows to view scroll back buffer in less

With Ctrl-Shift-H you can view the scrollback buffer in less and navigate with a bit more comfort. See More
JM80
DependableNechtan
Top Pro
•••

Scriptable interface

Remote control commands allow scripting from sub processes. See More
Simona
RespectfulNergal
Top Pro
•••

Can display images in terminal with icat kitten

See More
Simona
RespectfulNergal
Top Pro
•••

Config file is neatly arranged and everything is explained with comments

See More
Simona
Folât Pjêrsômêj
Top Pro
•••

Perfect tab support, especially for vim users

The keys needed to create, browse and quit tabs are intuitive and does not overlap with vim. The tab bar is also well designed and looks distinct from any bar that you could be using on vim. See More
Monika
ComposedEkecheiria
Top Pro
•••

Source code available

Source code is available so you could modify or review changes. See More
ComposedEkecheiria
Top Pro
•••

Includes additional features over PuTTy

Sessions filter Shortcuts for pre-defined command The session launcher Automatic logon script URL hyperlinks Running a locally saved script on a remote session Send to tray Transparency Quick start of a duplicate session SSH Handler: Internet Explorer integration pscp.exe and WinSCP integration New command-line options See More
HideSee All

39 Other Options Considered

89

Alacritty

My Recommendation for Alacritty

My Recommendation for Alacritty

Add Video or Image
All
20
Experiences
9
Pros
7
Cons
3
Specs
Monika
Maxwell Anderson
Goldie Lin
Top Pro
•••

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated

Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there. See More
Monika
PracticalPhilotes
Top Con
•••

Cannot into ligatures

Alacritty does not support ligatures in Fira Code, Iosevka etc. See More
Maxwell Anderson
Maxwell Anderson's Experience
Alacritty is FAST. It takes almost no time to launch the first time or ever while other terminal emulators I've used are slower in this regard. Alacritty also performs operations more quickly and smoothly than other terminal emulators. See More
Specs
Font Ligatures:No
Configurable:Yes, via automatically reloading YAML configuration file
GPU Acceleration:Yes
Semi
Top Pro
•••

Simple configuration

The configuration file is very well made and easy to use. You can fine tune your preferences to perfection in a matter of minutes. See More
Air Dedman
Top Con
•••

Unreliable Font Rendering

Like a box of chocolate you never know what you're going to get. See More
Air Dedman
Air Dedman's Experience
I really want to like alacrity but it's just missing too much and the font rendering is unreliable See More
InventiveIzanagi
Top Pro
•••

Comprehensive font options

Alacritty can be configured to adjust line spacing (height), letter spacing (width), and individual character horizontal/vertical positions. See More
Monika
Alex
HarmoniousKondole
Top Con
•••

Sacrifices basic features for raw performance

The Suzuki GSXR of terminals. Or your ditzy, blonde high school cheerleader; fast and pretty but not a lot going on under the hood. Eschews a negative developmental philosophy towards including said functionality, with the official reason cited in project documentation as "Not within the realm of a terminal emulator" and ostensibly, "best left up to other tools such as terminal multiplexers" [such as screen or tmux]. Which is unfortunate when you factor in speed against terminal with the functionality built in vs their reliance on 3rd party tools: tmux on alacritty: 'find /usr' time: 3.234s, cpu: 72% tmux on konsole: find /usr' time: 1.777s, cpu: 96% See issue here. See More
PersistentMushmahhu
PersistentMushmahhu's Experience
fast See More
HonorableAlkonost
Top Pro
•••

Looks good

Alacritty looks very slick on Linux, especially with GNOME or i3. See More
WorthyAjatar
WorthyAjatar's Experience
The fastest terminal emulator I have ever used. See More
FriendlyWagyl
Top Pro
•••

Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger

See More
firebird
firebird's Experience
i found that's fast and clear with big window See More
wolf
Top Pro
•••

Has text ref-low when window is resized

See More
Semi
Semi's Experience
From my experience, Alacritty is absolutely the fastest terminal emulator that I've used. I really enjoy the easy configuration that can be done. The only issue I really have with it is that it does use a decent bit more memory than others, it really is worth it for the insane speed it enables. See More
Monika
PrudentLir
Top Pro
•••

Fast and simple but with true color support

It's simple and fast like xterm or urxvt but with truecolor support which is a big plus if you use a terminal based code editor. Basically Alacritty has all the features you need and nothing you don't (if you're using tmux for multiplexing). See More
PositiveCantzicnal
PositiveCantzicnal's Experience
Running Alacrity 0.4.0 on Gentoo. The rendering is much faster than on any other terminal emulator I have tried. There is a scrollback buffer now, as well as text reflow on window resize. The yml configuration file is great, once you get used to its sensitivity to spacing. The default font size and colors, at least on Gentoo, were funny and I needed to change them. See More
FriendlyWagyl
FriendlyWagyl's Experience
This terminal is GPU Accelerated and therefore it is super smooth. See More
HonorableAlkonost
HonorableAlkonost's Experience
Ridiculously fast and simple. Who needs ligatures? But support for ligatures is coming. See More
HideSee All
89

st

My Recommendation for st

My Recommendation for st

Add Video or Image
All
32
Experiences
12
Pros
12
Cons
8
Simona
Monika
HardwareHero
Top Pro
•••

Low memory usage

st is built to serve as a lightweight terminal emulator. It's very light and doesn't require many resources to run, making it able to run well on older and low-end machines. See More
Simona
SmartAello
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

Configuration requires recompiling

Though recompilation takes seconds, knowledge of C header files is required for customization (though it's pretty easy to do for someone who knows how to edit config files). See More
InterestingPundjel
InterestingPundjel's Experience
extremely fast, very good for old computers and despite the need to recompile to change settings, it is very simple to configure. See More
Monika
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Extremely simple architecture

st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize. See More
PoliteLadon
Francisco
FlexibleAnnaPerenna
Top Con
•••

Text is cut off when resizing windows

In the vanilla build, when reducing windows, lines do not wrap, they are cut off. When the window is made large again, some of the text is missing. See More
André Pereira
André Pereira's Experience
Undoubtedly the fastest and most configurable. See More
Monika
mccauls7
Goldie Lin
Top Pro
•••

24-bit "True Color" support

st supports color escape sequences for a full 16 million 24-bit color spectrum, instead of the typical 256 colors. See More
Simona
SmartAello
DaringBochica
Top Con
•••

Crashes when some characters or colored fonts are displayed

See More
SmartAello
SmartAello's Experience
Fast, light, and clean. Patching is not hard if you use st-flexipatch, and configuration is very simple. See More
Jonathan
Chad Perrin
n1f7
Top Pro
•••

Developer team has the philosophy of delivering a reliable product without bugs

In keeping with the "suckless" philosophy of the developer team that created it, the st project aims to create a reliable, lightweight terminal emulator without surprising bugs. Part of the strategy for that involves leaving out any features that can be better provided by other tools. This "suckless" philosophy holds that duplicating features across multiple tools leads to bloat and complexity that have an impact on reliability and usability. See More
Rodney
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

No scrollback by default

The best way to perform scrollback is to use a multiplexer (such as tmux, screen, or dvtm) if you want scrollback and reverse-search support. See More
ThoughtfulTlazolteotl
ThoughtfulTlazolteotl's Experience
It doesn't support copy /paste operations... See More
Rodney
VigorousVeles
Top Pro
•••

Image previews

Handles image previews (e.g. in ranger) way better than other terminal emulators. See More
Monika
Rwithik Manoj
Top Con
•••

New features means installing patches

Just to get copy/paste support and scrolling, you have to install patches. And it's not that intuitive for a beginner. See More
DignifiedYopaat
DignifiedYopaat's Experience
Hackable and lightweight. I love software minimalism. See More
Simona
CredibleNargun
Chase Vasic
Top Pro
•••

Clean

The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable. See More
teadan
InfluentialBorysthenis
Top Con
•••

Internal border/margins

Doesn't support internal margins. See More
HealthyAkhushtal
HealthyAkhushtal's Experience
small, fast See More
wolfenlord
AuthenticMinerva
Top Pro
•••

Patches are great

The patches on the site are great. Scroll back, hide the mouse, etc. See More
Monika
DedicatedBes
Top Con
•••

Source code edits (aka configs) need to be redone after updating

See More
PerfectNamtar
PerfectNamtar's Experience
small but very capable See More
Monika
DignifiedYopaat
Top Pro
•••

Minimalist

Hackable and lightweight. See More
teadan
Monika
Chloe Montanez
Top Con
•••

Imperfect fontconfig support for CJK characters

It [st] doesn't seem to use CJK fonts provided by fontconfig while other programs use such fonts. See More
PoliteLadon
PoliteLadon's Experience
Easy to adapt to personal needs. See More
HardwareHero
mccauls7
Jonathan
Top Pro
•••

Support for fontconfig

There is full XFT (X Free Type interface library) and fallback font support through fontconfig in st. If your selected font is missing a certain glyph or symbol, but one of your other installed fonts has it, it will be shown. See More
DedicatedBes
DedicatedBes's Experience
beats everything else. See More
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Chad Perrin
Top Pro
•••

Copyfree licensing

Copyfree licensing implies that the user has the freedom to copy, use, modify, and distribute what he/she possesses. See More
TirelessTawhirimatea
TirelessTawhirimatea's Experience
There's no actual name of this font. At the download link leads to the website, but still no name of the actual font where could be downloaded as ttf format. See More
InterestingPundjel
Top Pro
•••

Blazing fast

it is extremely responsive and fast, even on older computers. See More
EmbiggenedWagyl
EmbiggenedWagyl's Experience
Very speedy, not bloated, good unicode and color support, "Just works." See More
Simona
Top Pro
•••

Clean

The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable. See More
Rwithik Manoj
Rwithik Manoj's Experience
st is a See More
HideSee All
88

Terminator

My Recommendation for Terminator

My Recommendation for Terminator

All
43
Experiences
12
Pros
19
Cons
12
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Multiple terminal panes to suit user's needs

It is possible to split the terminal window into several areas and you can re-size them as needed. Multiple windows and tabs are also supported. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
ano
Top Con
•••

Heavyweight

Due to its many features, Terminator can be a bit heavyweight and with lots of dependencies. This makes it unsuitable for old machines or computers with low resources. See More
Janaka Bandara
Janaka Bandara's Experience
Been using Terminator for quite a while, mainly for running the same set of commands against multiple remote machines; I must say Terminator has an impressive lot to offer, often surprising me by offering out-of-the-box even the minutest niche feature that I've been looking for! See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Highly customizable

You can change the size, color, and give different shapes to the terminal. You can also save multiple layouts and profiles via the GUI preferences editor. See More
mccauls7
Laura Kyle
Carlo Lobrano
Top Con
•••

Poor text search

Text search in Terminator does not highlight matching patterns when found. It just shows the row containing one of the matching patterns at the top of the terminal. This way text search is still usable, but not the best. See More
Jelle De Loecker
Jelle De Loecker's Experience
I've been using Terminator for many years. It's the easiest tab- and panel-based terminal emulator out there, which good support for the mouse & a simple GUI configuration. See More
Endi Sukaj
Stephen Boddy
Slimothy
Top Pro
•••

Can type on multiple grouped terminals simultaneously

You can type at the same time on any number of arbitrarily grouped terminals. (Or all at once, or only the focussed, all switchable with a shortcut or menu item). See More
Callixtus
Slimothy
Jaden Santary
Top Con
•••

Starting up can be slow

Terminator can be pretty slow (as far as terminals go) when first starting up. See More
kmf
kmf's Experience
I feel in control and it works as expected See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Extendable functionality through plugins

Terminator functionality can be extended via plugins. Examples of this include: Custom commands URL handlers (on top of common ones) for apt, launchpad, maven Logging output to file See More
Endi Sukaj
Carlos Adail Scherer Junior
Top Con
•••

Buggy and crashy

Crashes and closes many times a day when using split (and unsplit) shortcuts. The developers don't accept a bug report if isn't critical or not easy to reproduce. See More
PoisedLelantos
PoisedLelantos's Experience
It's the best terminal I ever tried, and I'm still using it to this day, I highly recommend it See More
mccauls7
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Save and launch layouts of terminals

Terminator allows the user to save, configure, and launch arrangements of windows, tabs, and terminals. See More
Nedas Kuzas
FunFujin
Top Con
•••

Bug - unable enter text after a while

A while after having a terminal window open, entering text is impossible. The terminal just sits there, not frozen, but with an empty command line. See More
PioneeringItzpapalotl
PioneeringItzpapalotl's Experience
Quick splitting of terminal windows and resizing with keyboard shortcuts. See More
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Configurable scrollback buffer

The scrollback lines can be set to a preferred value, or set to infinite scrollback. See More
JM80
Locke
Top Con
•••

Unable to specify startup window dimensions

Some users like their terminal windows to be a particular number of characters wide and tall. The default is 80x24 but some prefer something larger. Manually resizing every new instance gets old fast. See More
Ajay Kumar Rawani
Ajay Kumar Rawani's Experience
Awesome ! See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
xryx xross
Top Pro
•••

Can act as a drop-down terminal

If you want to use Terminator as a drop-down terminal, you can do so by editing the config file and set whichever key you want to use as a trigger. See More
HelpfulGatumdag
Top Con
•••

Multiple line copy and paste does not work correctly.

If an output line wraps onto two lines copying and pasting it will insert a line break character between the two lines even though the was no line break in the original output. Thus it is impossible to copy/paste lines longer than the terminal width. See More
PoisedAlpheus
PoisedAlpheus's Experience
Much better than others See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Configurable shortcuts

Many actions in Terminator can be triggered with configurable shortcuts. See More
Jelle De Loecker
Top Con
•••

Updating terminal layouts via the preferences window is hard

It's easy to save & name your current layout, but it's hard to edit it. Especially when you use custom startup commands per pane. See More
TirelessIllapa
TirelessIllapa's Experience
Love this terminal See More
mccauls7
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Both true and fake transparency

If you have a compositor, you can use true transparency. You can also have a fake transparency where an image can be used as a fake desktop. Both of these can be tinted with the background color too. See More
Jelle De Loecker
Top Con
•••

It uses the GTK VTE widget which does not support newest features

Newer and, admittedly, non-standard terminal features can't be used in Terminator. See More
OpinionatedPhylonoe
OpinionatedPhylonoe's Experience
Unmaintained. Doesn't use the SSH agent, so get ready to type your SSH password each time, if you use one. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Desktop notifications on silence and/or activity

There is a standard notification pop-up that appears if a terminal is silent for a configurable period, or if it has new activity. See More
Sean Lang
Top Con
•••

Cannot disable zooming

The ctrl + mouse scroll key binding can't be disabled. See More
NachoAz
NachoAz's Experience
Easy to use. Simple. Configurable via xfile. Easy shortcuts. See More
mccauls7
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Familiar to GNOME-Terminal users

When not constrained by it's own general principles and unique features, Terminator tries to follow the GNOME-Terminal way of doing things. See More
Nedas Kuzas
CourageousRohe
Top Con
•••

Redundant

Just use tmux instead. See More
Sassan Haradji
Sassan Haradji's Experience
Really poor, the main problem is vte, as long as Terminator is using vte I can't see a good future for it. vte is a broken terminal emulator with maintainers that have no idea what terminal emulation is about nor they have any idea what open source is. See More
Seth Petersen
Francisco
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Zoom and Maximize a single terminal for aiding focus

You can zoom (font size increases) or maximize (font size does not increase) a single terminal to fill the whole window with a shortcut. All the other terminals remain open, they are just hidden from sight, and everything is restored by repeating the shortcut. See More
v3ree
Top Con
•••

Ugly looking

The interface and the preferences window look outdated. See More
v3ree
v3ree's Experience
Tilix does it better. See More
mccauls7
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Comes with an extensive manual

Every single aspect of Terminator is exhaustively documented, and can be quickly opened with the common shortcut F1 (which is configurable, of course). See More
mccauls7
Stephen Boddy
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

User-friendly

Terminator has tabs, drag and drop re-ordering of terminals, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to help the user. It also has an extensive preferences window, or if you have to, a plain text config file. See More
mccauls7
Izem Lavrenti
Callixtus
Top Pro
•••

Tries to reduce resource usage through DBus

Unless this option is disabled (it's enabled by default), Terminator will only run the first instance as a process. And when it's run again, the DBus server will simply open a new window using the old process. This helps a lot with reducing resource usage. See More
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Carlo Lobrano
Top Pro
•••

Can save logs

Terminator has a really helpful functionality that lets the user start/stop a logger in order to save the text written in the shell into a file. In order to do this, the user needs to turn on the logging plugin in the plugin settings, and then a "start logger" menu item will appear in a right click menu when using the terminal. The user is also able to pick the path they would like the logs saved to when turning the plugin on. See More
Francisco
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Content reflow when a terminal is resized

If you have long lines of text inside a terminal and then you change the size of the terminal, the text will also automatically update according to the new size. See More
Callixtus
Stephen Boddy
Top Pro
•••

Can be driven by a script through DBus

Some activities can be scripted using a tool called remotinator which uses the DBus interface to command the application to perform a limited set of tasks. See More
Endi Sukaj
Lucifer Morningstar
Top Pro
•••

Tilix Config is easy and flexible

See More
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88

Konsole

My Recommendation for Konsole

My Recommendation for Konsole

Add Video or Image
All
22
Experiences
3
Pros
13
Cons
6
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Slimothy
Top Pro
•••

Supports split-view

Konsole supports split-view which splits the window into two (or more) konsole instances. This is very useful for people who work a lot on the terminal and don't want to spend time navigating between different windows or tabs. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Con
•••

KDE Library dependencies

While not an issue if using KDE, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers, there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app, making for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue. See More
Ganton
Ganton's Experience
split-view, tabs, embedded in Krusader, Dolphin... See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Slimothy
Top Pro
•••

Directory and SSH bookmarking

Konsole can bookmark ssh and telnet sessions, directories, and it can open tabs in a folder for easy access. See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

Uses a lot of memory

Although it's very fast, konsole has to use a lot of resources in return. It may use up to 30 MB per instance, depending on the number of tabs and the task at hand. See More
PatientBaalHammon
PatientBaalHammon's Experience
functionality most riched! See More
Lord Hung
Top Pro
•••

True color and Smooth font

Konsole supports true color and smooth font. This made konsole more fanstatic than other terminal emulators. See More
Alex
MotivatedKuninotokotachi
Stoi Pi
Top Con
•••

No good support for powerline character even with patched fonts

See More
Sayyid Hamid Mahdavi
Sayyid Hamid Mahdavi's Experience
easy to use and feature full See More
Callixtus
Slimothy
Zaar Hai
Top Pro
•••

Embeddable into the desktop

Konsole can be embedded into desktop so it's always easily accessible, but not in the way of other windows. See More
Daniel Menelkir
Top Con
•••

Can mess terminal keybinds

Most the of the time, the terminal keybinds are just ignored to obey the kde keybinds. Can be configured though. See More
mccauls7
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Export of output in plain text or HTML format

By going to file > save output, you can send all screen output to a text file. See More
Chloe Montanez
Lenovsky
Top Con
•••

Lack of DECSCUSR support

Konsole don't allow changing the cursor shape with extended DECSCUSR sequences, using instead the temporary-profile hack. This causes pain when working in (neo)vim inside Konsole. See More
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Slimothy
Top Pro
•••

Support in Dolphin file manager

Konsole can be accessed by pressing F4 in Dolphin, which is convenient for when the user needs to open the terminal in a particular spot of the file structure. See More
Endi Sukaj
Lord Hung
Top Con
•••

No support for double-width characters

Konsole no supports double width characters. For powerline users, you need to add a space after powerline glyph. See More
xji
schlaumeier
Top Pro
•••

Supports font ligature

Most terminals in Linux don't support font ligature, while many modern fonts such as PragmataPro or Fira Code already have decent coverage of font ligature. Support for font ligature makes user experience and font management much easier (i.e. you don't need to keep two copies of the same font just to use in the console) See More
Endi Sukaj
Luca Allulli
Top Pro
•••

Helps to identify tabs using custom icons

Users can associate each bookmark or SSH session with a custom icon, thus giving a visual hint to quickly identify a tab when a lot of tabs are open. See More
Leo Roos
Top Pro
•••

Supports advanced color schemes

In particular solarized. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Notification alerts about activity in a terminal

Konsole can monitor activities and notify the user through system notifications when a certain activity happens. This is a very customizable feature too: you can write scripts that can use this feature and notify you for whatever you want. See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Exceptionally fast

Konsole is usually very fast. It boots up very quickly and takes less than a second (averages to 0.25-0.59 seconds) to display files of up to 600 MB. See More
mccauls7
Slimothy
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Customize and save profiles

Profiles containing different settings can be created, saved, and loaded. Color schemes, window transparency, scroll bar, key bindings, start-up commands, window border, and menu bar can all be customized according to the user's needs. See More
teadan
IntellectualKuraokami
Top Pro
•••

Allows CTRL-SHIFT-c/v within WSL Ubuntu as well

Good menu to customize. See More
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88

Sakura

My Recommendation for Sakura

My Recommendation for Sakura

Add Video or Image
All
11
Experiences
1
Pros
8
Cons
2
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
tido
Top Pro
•••

Lightweight

Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources. See More
Alex
FearlessAegle
Top Con
•••

libvte/gtk

It has gnome dependencies. See More
SharpManat
SharpManat's Experience
Sable and lightweight See More
thermoplastics
k
Top Pro
•••

Great unicode support

Even shows combining chars correctly. See More
Endi Sukaj
necrophcodr
Top Con
•••

Doesn't provide many configuration options

Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities. See More
WiseParicia
Top Pro
•••

Few dependencies

See More
thermoplastics
k
Top Pro
•••

True colour support

Supports full 24-bit color. See More
mccauls7
Bryan
Patrick Wagner
Top Pro
•••

Starts quickly even on lower-end machines

Sakura's quick start-up time becomes noticeable with lower-end machine's such as Eeepc 1015PX (Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM). See More
Laura Kyle
Midi Storm
Top Pro
•••

Tab support

See More
Laura Kyle
Callixtus
Patrik Gustafsson (Paven)
Top Pro
•••

Easy zoom

Sakura supports zooming through keyboard keys (Ctrl+'+' to zoom in and Ctrl+'-' to zoom out). See More
Alex
zenobit
Top Pro
•••

Ready for wayland

See More
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87

Xfce4 terminal

My Recommendation for Xfce4 terminal

My Recommendation for Xfce4 terminal

Add Video or Image
All
22
Experiences
8
Pros
8
Cons
6
Endi Sukaj
Enrico Carlesso
Top Pro
•••

Good for systems with low specs

Like other applications included in the Xfce package, this terminal emulator is very lightweight and doesn't require many resources to run. This makes it perfect for systems that have low specs. See More
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Cornelius Foobaz
Top Con
•••

Cannot set text color for character under cursor to background color

Suppose you have a dark background with a light cursor and light foreground color: the light cursor will cover up whatever character it is on, so that you cannot read it. There is no option to set the foreground color for the character under the cursor to what is normally the background color. Such an option would allow you to read the character under the cursor. See More
WittyNgai
WittyNgai's Experience
A great middle ground between the blazing fast bare minimum (st, xterm, urxvt) and the slower but feature-packed heavyweights (Konsole, Terminology, Hyper). Supports most modern functionality (ssh, full colors, etc.) and quality of life features out of the box. Customization is quick and simple, albeit limited. Requires minimal resources. The feature which automatically copies mouse selections to the system clipboard is something you'll realize you can't live without. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of heavier alternatives, but that was never the goal with this terminal. See More
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

True transparency

You can set the transparency of the Xfce4 terminal on any amount you want, out of the box. See More
Monika
Alex Baranowski
Top Con
•••

Resizing text resizes window

See More
InquisitiveUksakka
InquisitiveUksakka's Experience
simple yet effective especially for low-spec computers. See More
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Tabs support

Xfce4 fully supports tabs and tab-based navigation. See More
Endi Sukaj
Andreas Wehler
Top Con
•••

No profiles

There's no profiles or profile-based customization in Xfce-terminal. See More
howtopam
howtopam's Experience
xfce4-terminal allows numerous style configuration changes to toolbars, tabs. menus, window borders, font and background colors with opacity and transparency and even the option to be utilized in "drop-down" mode. See More
Laura Kyle
Dong Nguyen
Top Pro
•••

Almost everything is customizable

You can configure size, color, background, etc. See More
luarocks
Top Con
•••

Can't scroll on spamming text

When text generates too fast, you can't scroll it, so you just can't read anything in such moments. See More
CrediblePinikir
CrediblePinikir's Experience
I love how customizable this little guy is. No other terminal can compare to it! See More
mccauls7
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Composition effects

Xfce4 terminal takes advantage of xfce composition effects. See More
I.M. Rowse
Top Con
•••

Does not support sixel images

See More
OpinionatedPhylonoe
OpinionatedPhylonoe's Experience
Very basic fork of the traditional gnome-terminal; not worth mentioning. See More
Sebastian J. Bronner
Top Pro
•••

Fast rendering

See More
howtopam
Top Con
•••

Execution in xfce4-terminal - e mode is not always functional

See More
I.M. Rowse
I.M. Rowse's Experience
Does not support sixel images. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Can be switched to a drop-down terminal

You can configure the Xfce-terminal to act as a dropdown terminal if you want, which makes for greater ease of use. See More
DependableAkhushtal
DependableAkhushtal's Experience
95 See More
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Customizable key bindings

See More
JollyDeimos
JollyDeimos's Experience
It got a drop-down mode! So, apt-get remove guake!! See More
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82

Tilix

My Recommendation for Tilix

My Recommendation for Tilix

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All
30
Experiences
8
Pros
18
Cons
4
ReflectiveAnicetus
Philipp Wolfer
Top Pro
•••

Multiple sessions inside a single window

In addition to tiling, Tilix supports placing separate sessions in tabs or switching from one to another through a sidebar. See More
DynamicAm-heh
Top Con
•••

Unmaintained

Bugs and pull requests are not processed. See More
CreativeMelinoe
CreativeMelinoe's Experience
Looks great, never gave me any issues, has plenty of features and customization (including transparency, idk why other terminals don't do this.) See More
thermoplastics
mccauls7
Philipp Wolfer
Top Pro
•••

Integrates nicely into GNOME 3

Tilix follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and uses the UI patterns of this desktop environment. See More
HilariousBaduhenna
Top Con
•••

No font ligatures

See More
PrudentSuadela
PrudentSuadela's Experience
Crashing alot See More
mccauls7
Rok
Top Pro
•••

Tiling makes for ease of use

The user can split terminals horizontally or vertically, according to their needs or preferences. See More
Szymon
Top Con
•••

Takes a bit more memory than Gnome terminal

Would've expected this to be more lightweight. See More
Buster Blue
Buster Blue's Experience
A prime example of a modern terminal emulator, and also the one that integrates best with Gnome, even beating the official "Gnome Terminal". See More
thermoplastics
mccauls7
Rok
Top Pro
•••

Fancy looks

Tilix has that new GNOME look, with a HeaderBar. It can also be disabled. See More
Nedas Kuzas
Endi Sukaj
TrustworthyTakemikazuchi
Top Con
•••

Heavyweight

Tilix has quite a lot of dependencies and takes ~100MB of RAM when running. See More
ConfidentPoena
ConfidentPoena's Experience
Tilix is a full featured along with Quack option which most terminals miss and need to be installed as separate terminal. See More
thermoplastics
mccauls7
Philipp Wolfer
Top Pro
•••

Configurable shortcuts

Many actions in Tilix can be triggered with configurable shortcuts. See More
Massimiliano Adamo
Massimiliano Adamo's Experience
simply the best See More
thermoplastics
Gerald Nunn
Top Pro
•••

Can be used as a drop-down terminal

The new 1.30 version of Tilix supports a quake mode enabling it to work as a drop-down terminal. See More
Aurelius
Aurelius's Experience
I've been using Tilix ever since switching to Ubuntu Budgie about a year ago. It's absolutely great, especially if you aren't using a tiling WM but like to have tiled terminals. It makes A/B terminal surfing super easy; you can be editing code in one tile and reading a man page in another, for example. It's a bit heavyweight when it comes to RAM, but on modern systems this shouldn't be an issue at all. Definitely check out the keyboard shortcuts -- I use them all the time! See More
Laura Kyle
Khải Hoàng
Top Pro
•••

Extremely fast

As fast as gnome-terminal, if not faster. See More
Szymon
Szymon's Experience
Snappier than Gnome terminal once it launches. Works very well with i3. Takes a bit longer to launch. See More
thermoplastics
Khải Hoàng
Top Pro
•••

Good alternative to Terminator

Tiling and ability to type into multiple terminals simultaneously is Terminator's 2 most significant features. Tilix has them as well. See More
v3ree
v3ree's Experience
Does everything that old Terminator does.. but in style! It's a nice example of a modern terminal emulator. See More
thermoplastics
Khải Hoàng
Top Pro
•••

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

Tilix follows GNOME HIG whereas gnome-terminal doesn't. GNOME should use Tilix as their default terminal. See More
thermoplastics
Philipp Wolfer
Top Pro
•••

Transparent background

Unlike the standard GNOME Terminal, Tilix supports configurable background transparency. See More
CourteousNiamh
Top Pro
•••

Copy on select

See More
Simona
Ken Kinder
Top Pro
•••

Copy as HTML

You can copy text from the terminal as HTML for embedding in web settings. See More
HilariousBaduhenna
Top Pro
•••

Easy

See More
Khải Hoàng
Top Pro
•••

Lightweight

See More
Chloe Montanez
HardwareHero
Philipp Wolfer
Top Pro
•••

Able to write into multiple terminals simultaneously

Inside a session, you can select multiple terminals, which will receive the same input simultaneously. See More
Simona
Ken Kinder
Top Pro
•••

Solarized themes built-in

Great support for solarized color schemes, and no setup is involved. See More
Szymon
Top Pro
•••

Faster than Gnome Terminal

When running commands it feels snappier. See More
Bryan
Philipp Wolfer
Top Pro
•••

Terminus can notify you about finished tasks and perform actions based on terminal output

See More
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82

Guake

My Recommendation for Guake

My Recommendation for Guake

Add Video or Image
All
15
Experiences
4
Pros
8
Cons
3
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Drop-down terminal

You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen. See More
Paolo
Ben Creasy
Top Con
•••

Not cross-platform

Linux only, and additionally targeting GTK3. See More
RespectablePolybotes
RespectablePolybotes's Experience
F12 is so easy and nice to open the terminal See More
mccauls7
Slimothy
Green Luo
Top Pro
•••

Supports transparency

Transparency is particularly useful for when you need to refer to the information displayed by application under Guake window. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Slimothy
Top Con
•••

Not very responsive

Occasionally, Guake slows down and is not very responsive. See More
Sassan Haradji
Sassan Haradji's Experience
The main problem is vte, as long as guake is using vte I can't see a good future for it. vte is a broken terminal emulator with maintainers that have no idea what terminal emulation is about nor they have any idea what open source is. See More
mccauls7
Laura Kyle
Mitch Dodge
Top Pro
•••

Hotkey support

Guake is very fast and easy to open with a customizable hotkey, meaning there's no fiddling with menus or icons. See More
Monika
Sassan Haradji
Top Con
•••

No font ligature

Guake uses vte for its terminal emulation, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it. He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not. See More
LoveableBunene
LoveableBunene's Experience
Easy to use, easy to keep track of the tabs and name them, making it clean and tidy. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Extremely customizable

Guake's appearance is very customizable: from the transparency to the width and height of the window. You can also choose which key to use for toggling the terminal window. See More
ImaginativePudicitia
ImaginativePudicitia's Experience
Great support by beautiful Gogh themes. Renamable tabs. Split terminal, highly customization. Drop down. Transparent. Pretty decent terminal overall (slightly better than Tilix imo). See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Available in many popular distro repositories

Guake is available in a lot of repositories for the most popular distros. This makes it very easy to obtain and install on almost any system. See More
mccauls7
Green Luo
Top Pro
•••

Shortcut key F12 can be used to toggle

The global shortcut key, F12, can be used to easily toggle the terminal window. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Tabs support

Guake supports tabs, while working with them is very easy. See More
Svjatoslavs Krasnikovs
FunnySarakka
Top Pro
•••

Can choose byobu as shell

You can choose byobu as shell, by adding a line to /etc/shells : " /usr/bin/byobu" and get guake with byobu ... sweet! See More
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76

xterm

My Recommendation for xterm

My Recommendation for xterm

Add Video or Image
All
18
Experiences
1
Pros
10
Cons
7
Brenton Horne
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Used in almost every Linux distribution

If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution. See More
Monika
ImaginativeBeaivi
Top Con
•••

Bad defaults

Very small default size. No way to know to how to configure size. See More
I.M. Rowse
I.M. Rowse's Experience
Supports sixel images. See More
thermoplastics
Chad Perrin
Top Pro
•••

Stable, well-tested

See More
Simona
IntuitiveShamash
Top Con
•••

No tabs

See More
mccauls7
Jonathan
Chad Perrin
Top Pro
•••

Standard with X Window system

Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators. See More
Simona
André Pereira
Top Con
•••

It blinks

If it blinks for you too, you can try this: man xterm and then press Shift+G. See More
HardwareHero
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Lightweight

Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines. See More
ImaginativeBeaivi
Top Con
•••

Has few dependencies

Has dependencies like xbitmaps. See More
mccauls7
Chad Perrin
Top Pro
•••

Shows full characters for wide fallback fonts

Many terminal emulators that deal with wider fallback fonts (i.e. double-wide characters in CJK fonts) truncate display of wide characters, show Unicode "missing glyph" characters, or simply fail to display the characters at all. XTerm is "smart" enough to simply take up the extra space needed to show such wide characters. See More
mccauls7
Eric Mrak
Top Con
•••

No native transparency

Xterm does not natively support transparency (though it can be emulated if needs be). See More
Monika
WittyMneme
Top Pro
•••

In about 30 years, it had only one issue, and that was fixed quickly

See More
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Callixtus
Top Con
•••

Historical source code

The stories behind terminal emulation beyond their classical representatives (of which xterm is simply the most long-lived) are somewhere inbetween subtly irritating to downright surreal. See More
Simona
André Pereira
Top Pro
•••

It is fast and responsive

See this. See More
Jaden Santary
Top Con
•••

Slowest Linux terminal

See More
mccauls7
Eric Mrak
Top Pro
•••

Many modern terminals emulate xterm

Many terminal applications, such as OS X's Terminal.app and iTerm2 (among others), all claim xterm or xterm- variants as their $TERM and aim for support of xterm's escape sequences. Many command-line applications will assume or even hard-code escape-sequences and behavior for xterm and those terminals emulating it. See More
OptimisticLofn
Top Pro
•••

Configurable via Xresources

X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons See More
I.M. Rowse
Top Pro
•••

Supports sixel images

See More
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75

Yakuake

My Recommendation for Yakuake

My Recommendation for Yakuake

All
22
Experiences
3
Pros
13
Cons
6
Sajad Hoviehgar
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Drop-down terminal makes for ease of use

Yakuake is a drop-down terminal. This means that you can press, for example, F12, and it slides downward from the top edge of the screen. After you are done with it, you can then hit F12 again and it slides back on top. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Con
•••

KDE Library dependencies

While not an issue if using KDE, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers, there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app. This makes for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue. See More
malevolent
malevolent's Experience
After trying a lot of terminal emultators, I realized yakuake is the best out there. And yet it could add a very few cool features from other terminals, it has more options, configurations and personalizations than the competence. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Very customizable

Almost everything in Yakuake is customizable: from split view, fullscreen mode, configurable dimensions, to animation speed and keybindings. See More
Moshe Reubinoff
Top Con
•••

No sessions support

See More
FearlessBirdu
FearlessBirdu's Experience
I was going to switch to Guake, but I figured out there's a rich "Appearance preferences" in "Manage Profiles" who would have thought! I thought it's some kind of Session related staff See More
Sajad Hoviehgar
Laura Kyle
Andrey Izman
Top Pro
•••

Split layout

You can easily split any tab into different windows and run several commands at the same time then monitor and change them with ease. You won't find this feature in guake or tilda! See More
Paolo
ProfessionalHonos
Top Con
•••

No Windows support

See More
NeighborlyKuaFu
NeighborlyKuaFu's Experience
I found dropdown terminals a lot more usefult than having a bunch of floating terminal windows. Keeping this in mind, yakuake is far the best dropdown terminal. It has a bunch of features others doesn't have, is lightning fast and problably the most lightweigh out there. I have it installed even on systems with xfce or i3wm, despite I need to install a few dependencies (people who say it has "a lot" of dependenciess, doesn't say they are less than 200MB, and probably less if you already have any Qt application already installed). The hability to avoid using the mouse while working is crucial in my job, and with yakuake you can acomplish it almost entirely, is highly configurable and pretty eye candy, besides the fastest response and small memory footprint I told before. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
-rod
Top Pro
•••

Tabs support

Yakuake supports tabs, while working with several tabs is very easy. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t. To move through them: Shift + left/right arrow. See More
CaffeinatedAnuket
Top Con
•••

Theming options are very limited, Does not integrate naturally with the DE

See More
Endi Sukaj
Last Viimeinen
Zaar Hai
Top Pro
•••

Similar with Konsole's features

Line-by-line scroll with Shift-Up, configurable - possibly infinite scrollback, Unicode support, componistion/transparency, splits + keyboard navigation, visual highlighting. See More
NeighborlyKuaFu
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

Slow

Is not slow at all. I have yakuake installed in all my computers (8) and it launches immediatly after pressing the hotkey. Must be a error from yourt side. Yakuake has started to get really slow with the latest updates: it takes up to 3 seconds to start up after you have clicked the assigned hotkey. See More
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Unlimited scroll history

You can scroll, inside the same terminal session, infinitely, so no command should be lost, even it isn't stored yet on history. See More
NeighborlyKuaFu
Chad Perrin
Top Con
•••

Heavy

Not true at all. I from far one of the lightiest graphical terminals out there. Mine is 14MB with a bunch of split views and 4 tabs at the moment of writing this. See More
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Lightweight

Opens at 40MB and stays below 100MB with some tabs splitted in four each. So if you need to have many terminals emulators opened in your desktop environment, is the a very light solution for all the features it includes. See More
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Quick move through splits and tabs

You can move through terminals with Ctrl+Shift+Cursors or tabs with Shift+Cursor keys, so no need to touch you mouse or pad, making working with terms even faster. See More
malevolent
raist356
Top Pro
•••

Monitor for activity/silence

When an activity is let working (e.g.: compiling some source or upgrading some system), and you forgot it, a nice popup and sound will alert you when the command prompt returned on that term. See More
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Enhanced focused terminal

You can configure yakuake to show a visual altert when you change the terminal. So even if you have many splittings and you don't use the mouse to change between them, you can easily see where you are at any moment. See More
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Save output as text

You can save the output of a terminal directly to a text file, to work properly with it later. See More
Paolo
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Wayland support

As the entire Plasma Desktop, yakuake already has full support for Wayland. See More
malevolent
Top Pro
•••

Quick search support

Search directly in your favourite search engine just by selecting something and right clicking. It will open the browser result page. See More
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74

Terminology

My Recommendation for Terminology

My Recommendation for Terminology

Add Video or Image
All
15
Experiences
2
Pros
8
Cons
5
WhiteLilac
timofonic timofonic
Jonathan
Top Con
•••

Configuration is sometimes complicated and non-obvious

There's a "Settings" menu for configuration, but more options there would make it easier. Downloading themes and extensions from the official repo would be a big plus. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Scalable fonts

Font size in Terminology automatically scales according to window size. When you resize the window, so does the text. See More
WalstonTempest
WalstonTempest's Experience
A winner on looks with functionality, my choice everytime. Has some quirky keyboard shortcuts to master, if you want to get the most from it. See More
Durver Eriksson
Top Con
•••

No True-Color support

Not able to display a modern full range of colors, yet. See More
Rūdis
WalstonTempest
Top Pro
•••

Looks smashing

Terminals are often very dull looks wise, not so with terminology. See More
Aurelius
Aurelius's Experience
Just tried Terminology out for the first time. I've been using Tilix for ages, and wanted to see what else was out there. This terminal is very slick and flashy, which I like! It's a breath of fresh air into the terminal emulator scene, which is almost always very boring and flat. They manage to do this without compromising on usability or speed, which is awesome. It's very customizable, and it tiles like Tilix which is a huge plus. I now have both in my Plank, we'll see which one gets more usage in the long run. See More
HelpfulGatumdag
Top Con
•••

Scrollback is completely nroken

Scrolling back the emulator inserts random lines from other places in the scrollback buffer in between the actuall output lines. Thus it is impossible to see a correct copy of the previous output. See More
mccauls7
Wernight
Slimothy
Top Pro
•••

In-terminal video, picture and thumbnail support

Thumbnails, pictures, and videos can all be rendered in-terminal, based on the directory listing or mouse interactions. For instance, using "ls" on a picture folder will produce a list of thumbnails instead of only the filenames. See More
timofonic timofonic
mccauls7
Positronic Tomato
Top Con
•••

No scrollbar

The lack of scrollbar in Terminology makes navigation difficult. But you can use keys for it. See More
Endi Sukaj
Francisco Navarrete
Top Pro
•••

Splitable

You can split windows, like in terminator. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

Too many bells and whistles

Some people feel that Terminology has too many features that are not suited for a terminal, but for a window manager instead. For instance, viewing thumbnails, watching videos and gifs, and other similarly flashy things just feel like eye candy and should not be part of a terminal emulator. See More
Francisco Navarrete
Top Pro
•••

Visually customizable

It is very customizable in every aspect of the visual options. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Carl Snyder
Top Pro
•••

Integrates well with Enlightenment WM

Terminology is part of the Enlightenment WM packages. As such, it integrates really well with Enlightenment and other tools in the package. See More
Slimothy
Francisco Navarrete
Top Pro
•••

Block copy

You can copy text in blocks. See More
mccauls7
Chad Perrin
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Copyfree licensing

Terminology uses the Simplified BSD License. As it is a copyfree license, it tends to minimize license incompatibilities, legal compliance requirements, and various other complexities that may make it difficult to understand certain licenses. See More
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74

Gnome Terminal

My Recommendation for Gnome Terminal

My Recommendation for Gnome Terminal

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All
30
Experiences
8
Pros
13
Cons
8
Specs
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Good integration with other GNOME-Shell apps

Gnome Terminal integrates well into Gnome Desktop, as well as the rest of the core Gnome Shell apps. See More
Nedas Kuzas
LogicalPaidia
DelightfulNeptune
Top Con
•••

No background transparency

While this used to be a good option, background transparency has been removed. See More
TirelessTawrich
TirelessTawrich's Experience
I used to love Gnome Terminal, but for the past few years it has only gotten worse and worse with every update, just like a bad movie series where every sequel is worse than the previous film. It's never a good sign when the devs deleting features with bugs instead of fixing said bugs... See More
Specs
License:GPLv3+
Source repository:https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal
mccauls7
Callixtus
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Exceptionally fast

The Gnome Terminal is usually very fast. It boots up very quickly and takes less than a second (averages to 0.25-0.59 seconds) to display files of up to 600 MB. See More
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Chad Perrin
Top Con
•••

Gnome library dependencies

While not an issue if using Gnome, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app making for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean this may be an issue. See More
DeliberateCheuksin
DeliberateCheuksin's Experience
No support for split terminals Splitting terminals is really a wonderful feature nowadays when your screen is huge. Having multiple instances of the same program all over it is just painful to manage. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Support for tabs

Gnome Terminal allows for the use of tabs by right clicking in the terminal window and selecting open new tab or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+t by default. See More
Simona
CleverRindr
Top Con
•••

Font rendering doesn't look good

it seems that everything is fatter per default. See More
Elias Van Ootegem
Elias Van Ootegem's Experience
Fast, full feature set, customisable. I've used Gnome terminal for years, and still haven't found a certain feature to be missing. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Supports scrolling

You can scroll up and down in Gnome terminal. And if you wish to do so, you can also hide the scrollbar. See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

Heavyweight

To achieve a large amount of speed, Gnome Terminal has to use a relatively large amount of memory to run. It may eat up to 15-30 MB per instance, depending on the task it's doing. See More
DelightfulNeptune
DelightfulNeptune's Experience
Simple, easily customizable, and good integration with gnome environment See More
mccauls7
Bryan
Capi Etheriel
Top Pro
•••

Solarized colors

Gnome Terminal comes with a solarized colorscheme installed and ready to use. See More
mccauls7
Abyss
Top Con
•••

No tab names

Since Gnome 3, the feature for manual renaming of tabs was reaped off. See More
AwesomestSaubarag
AwesomestSaubarag's Experience
Crashes all the time, taking all instances down together. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Content re-flow when window is resized

When using the GNOME Terminal, if you have long lines of text inside it and then you change the window, the text will also automatically update according to the new window size. See More
Monika
Sassan Haradji
Top Con
•••

Doesn't support font ligature still in 2019

gnome-terminal uses vte for its terminal emulator, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it. He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not. See More
Sassan Haradji
Sassan Haradji's Experience
Really poor, the main problem is vte, as long as gnome-terminal is using vte I can't see a good future for it. vte is a broken terminal emulator with maintainers that have no idea what terminal emulation is about nor they have any idea what open source is. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Kevin Cox
Top Pro
•••

Notifications upon command completion

This isn't in the current release but in development versions you get notifications when commands are complete. This is great for long-running commands, relieving you from continuously checking to see if your command is done. See More
Saul Pwanson
Top Con
•••

Incomplete vt handling due to using libvte

See More
ImaginativePudicitia
ImaginativePudicitia's Experience
Ugly design, esp the one inUbuntu 18.04. no tab renaming, waste a lots of screen space for extra title bar. See More
Chloe Montanez
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Configurable keybindings

Configurable key bindings can be used for copy-paste, sending SIGINT, switching tabs, and so on. See More
thermoplastics
Chad Perrin
Top Con
•••

Restrictive license

See More
v3ree
v3ree's Experience
It's simple and has all the basics, it integrates well in Gnome and it looks good, it's perfect for a terminal multiplexer like tmux if you want tiling / sessions. See More
Simona
DelightfulNeptune
Top Pro
•••

Transparency

We can change the alpha canal and see through the terminal. See More
py
Top Pro
•••

Open Source

See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Drop-down support

Drop-down functionality can be added to Gnome Terminal via an extension. See More
mccauls7
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Clever memory management

Multiple terminals are managed from one gnome-terminal instance that takes up about 45 MB. Adding on other instances (with 10k lines of used buffer), each terminal requires about 16 MB of memory. See More
Simona
LearnedHannahannah
Top Pro
•••

Getting better and better over time

Tilix used to surpass gnome-terminal but right now they are both the best options unless you have special needs. See More
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66

Tilda

My Recommendation for Tilda

My Recommendation for Tilda

Add Video or Image
All
7
Experiences
1
Pros
5
Cons
1
HardwareHero
mccauls7
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Highly customizable

There are tons of customizations you can make: from adding colors to text, turning backgrounds transparent, setting the size to be "maximized", toggling scrollbar on and off, adjusting orientation/borders/animation, etc. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Top Con
•••

Contains some annoying bugs

Tilda can be buggy at times. For example, if you don't close it before shutdown, it may prompt you to reconfigure it all over again on the next boot. See More
DevotedIkuTurso
DevotedIkuTurso's Experience
Adding and Closing Tabs with keyboard shortcut is problematic. See More
mccauls7
Slimothy
Jaden Santary
Top Pro
•••

Easily accessible drop-down

The drop-down function in Tilda does not get in the way and can be accessed at any time with a keyboard shortcut. See More
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro
•••

Few dependencies

Tilda is a very minimal and lean terminal emulator. It requires very few dependencies and the amount of resources needed is small. See More
VigilantBuarainech
Top Pro
•••

Supports transparency

You can monitor information displayed by applications under Tilda. See More
StudiousNechtan
Top Pro
•••

Tabs support

Tilda supports tabs. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t. To move through them: Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn. See More
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59

Pantheon Terminal

My Recommendation for Pantheon Terminal

My Recommendation for Pantheon Terminal

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All
12
Experiences
2
Pros
5
Cons
5
thermoplastics
Daniel Foré
Top Pro
•••

End process notifications

When a process has ended, Pantheon Terminal sends a notification bubble to the desktop notification server and indicates which tab generated the notification. See More
Chad Perrin
Top Con
•••

Heavy

See More
davidak
davidak's Experience
Beautiful and user friendly terminal. See More
Endi Sukaj
Callixtus
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Can easily restore a previous session

Pantheon Terminal remembers the window size, position, windowed/maximized/fullscreen state, and open tabs in between sessions. See More
HonestDione
Top Con
•••

limited customization options

See More
IncredibleDeimos
IncredibleDeimos's Experience
Good looking in just out of box! See More
mccauls7
thermoplastics
Daniel Foré
Top Pro
•••

Advanced tab handling

Using the Granite Dynamic Notebook widget (which includes tab close history), double click the tab bar for a new tab, duplicating tabs, quickly closing all other tabs, auto-hiding/revealing tab close buttons, etc. See More
thermoplastics
Slimothy
Top Con
•••

RAM usage increases considerably over time

There is a RAM leak when using the Pantheon Terminal that adds up over time and use. See More
mccauls7
Callixtus
thermoplastics
Top Pro
•••

Smart copy and paste

The keyboard shortcut for copy + paste is intelligently adapted andnbased on text selection and clipboard state. This makes it possible to use standard copy + paste shortcuts without colliding with standard ctrl + c behavior in the Terminal. See More
mccauls7
Endi Sukaj
Thorsummoner0
Top Con
•••

Incompatible with LTS Ubuntu

Pantheon is developed and binaries are released for a near blessing edge operating system (elementary OS). As such, installing it on an LTS Ubuntu system may be nearly impossible without replacing a large portion of the LTS stack that Ubuntu-targeted software expects. See More
Julien Chanséaume
Top Pro
•••

Search feature

See More
thermoplastics
Chad Perrin
Top Con
•••

Restrictive license

See More
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--

cool-retro-term

My Recommendation for cool-retro-term

My Recommendation for cool-retro-term

Add Video or Image
All
8
Experiences
1
Pros
4
Cons
3