Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Konsole vs cmder, the Slant community recommends cmder for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” cmder is ranked 1st while Konsole is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose cmder is:
Cmder builds on [ConEmu](https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5) console emulator, by adding enhancements from [clink](http://mridgers.github.io/clink/) (such as bash-style completion in cmd.exe and PowerTab in powershell.exe) and optionally extending it with [msysgit](http://msysgit.github.io), that brings Unix tools to Windows.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Directory and SSH bookmarking
Konsole can bookmark ssh and telnet sessions, directories, and it can open tabs in a folder for easy access.
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.
Pro True color and Smooth font
Konsole supports true color and smooth font. This made konsole more fanstatic than other terminal emulators.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Pro Supports advanced color schemes
In particular solarized.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Allows CTRL-SHIFT-c/v within WSL Ubuntu as well
Good menu to customize.
Pro Minimal and portable version available
There is a portable version of cmder available which is just 10 MB in size. It can be put on an external device, like a USB stick, and run off it. There's no installation required.
Pro Has built-in Quake style drop-down mode
This is an extremely useful mode whereby the console hides and shows on ctrl+~ similar to a gaming console. This feature is inherited from ConEmu.
Pro Works nicely with command line applications
Such applications include CMD, Powershell, and MinTTY.
Pro File explorer integration
Cmder can be added to the right-click menu, allowing the user to start a terminal session from the selected directory with a "Cmder Here" command. The functionality can be enabled by opening up a terminal with administrator privileges, navigating to the Cmder folder and executing .\cmder.exe /REGISTER ALL.
Pro Monokai color scheme
Cmder pretties up the default look of ConEmu using Monokai color scheme out of the box and allows flexible color and transparency schemes, including custom out-of-focus opacity.
Pro Integrates with graphical applications
Portable GUI applications can be integrated directly into the interface of the terminal emulator.
For example, it's possible to integrate ST3 with cmder by moving the portable version of ST3 to /cmder/vendor/ and editing alias file in /cmder/config/aliases to include subl="%CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe" $1 -new_console:s75V. Now writing subl in the command line will open ST3. The alias of subl can be changed to whatever's needed and similarly, the -new_console option's parameters can be changed to alter how the text editor integrates with the terminal emulator. It can be horizontal or vertical splits of varying sizes or tabs, etc.
Pro Works with WSL bash.exe
CMDer works great with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Just change your startup task to point to the bash.exe file.
Pro Highly flexible
Integrates with:
- cygwin
- mintty
- powershell
- msysgit
Pro Works with ZSH and Oh My ZSH through WSL (using ubuntu 18.04)
Set ZSH as shell using "chsh" command, and launch the console using "ubuntu1804" command.
Pro Works with VS Code, Hyper and IDEs
Cmder can be used with popular editors such as VS Code, which delivers aliases and clink as well as its color scheme to VS Code.
It can also be used without ConEmu and Hyper as an alternative terminal emulator, which makes customizing the UI through NPM plugins much easier.
Cons
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.
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.
Con No good support for powerline character even with patched fonts
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.
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.
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.
Con Issues with non-unicode characters
'ls' command can have issues with non-unicode characters such as cyrillic. As of 1.1.2, 'dir' can be used as a substitute that will properly display non-unicode characters. Unfortunately, it's an issue with msysgit that isn't being officially addressed (a workaround is available) thus no official ETA on the bugfix is available.
Con Not as portable as advertised
Even though cmder is advertised as a "portable terminal emulator for Windows", it's not adequately minimalistic to be considered truly portable. In fact, one of the dependencies required to use it is the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015.
Con Issues with escape codes
Sometimes it doesn't interpret terminal escape codes correctly and the output gets mangled using tmux over ssh, for instance.
Con Slower than ConEmu
Con There is no ligatures support
As though the fonts like Fira Code or Hasklig work in Cmder, this enhancement for the Windows command prompt doesn't display ligatures in the above-mentioned fonts.
Con Lots of conflicts with OS keybindings
By default, things lke ctrl-w will close your window unexpectedly when using nano or trying to delete a word in bash.
Con The portable (mini) version does not have UNIX commands
UNIX command support is only available for the full version.
Con Very slow
Scrolling in vim lags the screen and can crash.
