So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
I don’t get the fixation people have with terminals. I don’t think I’ve ever used one in Linux that made me think “you know, I need to install a better terminal emulator”. So I just use what comes with my DE.
I am on EndeavourOS and install packages via the command line and on top of that I primarily use Neovim, so I spend a decent amount of time in the terminal
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Understandable and fair. I enjoy trying different stuff though. I’m not saying other people need to switch to another terminal emulator, I’m just here to ask what everyone else is using and then try it out myself, for fun :3
Edit: To add onto that, if I didn’t wanna try new stuff, I’d still be on Windows. I never had any major problems with it until I discovered the things Linux does better, and so if I just went with what seems fine I’d still be using Windows now. There’s not an inherent problem with that, of course, but overall the switch has benefited me. I like trying new things, you know?
I get that, but even when I worked as a coder using vim I didn’t care. What makes, let’s say, Gnome terminal a bad terminal?
My counterpoint is terminator. The logger plugin saved my ass a few times, it remembers the commands I ran and what their output was so I don’t have to.
I guess it depends on if you’re willing to take advantage of the extra features, or just want to do as little CLI as possible
Nowadays I don’t use the CLI much. But back in the day I used vim professionally and still didn’t care. Maybe because I ran everything from within vim?
There are two kinds of powerusers, and they DO NOT understand each other one bit.
The first, like you, just wants to get shit done and want to avoid the friction of choosing/installing/configuring their tools. GNOME, Chromium, and VSCode will do just fine.
The second, like me, wants to get shit done as well, but has a strong need for a very specific workflow. I’ll spend half an hour to get a toolchain working on nvim instead of using a pre-baked VSCode plugin. Not because VSCode is bad, but because I have a very (!) specific workflow and associated muscle memory and anything else distracts and unsettles me.
Some of the best engineers I know fall into either category, neither way is superior it’s just how brains are wired.
Anyway I use Kitty because it allows me to split tabs into windows (not windows into tabs! ew!), has low latency with high throughput thanks to GPU rendering, and a low memory footprint.
Oh that made a ton of sense! I don’t customize as much because I’m a completionist and would waste a whole week on it and not even change much from defaults anyway.
I also checked kitty and terminator and I can see the appeal. I’m used to opening separate windows and tile them using window manager commands to get a similar effect.
Thanks for your response, that was an eye opener!
Providing it has tabs, I’ll use it.
I like customizing mine and switch DEs often, and use multiple across different devices. It’s easier to find one good terminal that can share a config and work well on each device and DE.
Alacritty is really nice and easy to configure, and isn’t “tied” to any desktop environment, like Konsole is. Kitty is really cool for its implementation of image display. Foot is a Wayland-native alternative that is also really nice to use.
+1 for kitty. Embedded images for Ranger is super cool. The only downside is i’ve been getting rendering issues for a couple seconds after waking up from suspend but that’s probably a configuration issue on my end
Call me boring, but I really like the Gnome terminal.
There was one terminal that blew my mind in terms of speed and features, and it was Kitty: it’s properly fast and it’s packed with fantastic features, such as the ability to display images and play videos in the terminal itself.
However, I uninstalled it because it did one thing that really, REALLY rubbed me the wrong way: by default, it phones home to find updates.
Any software that phones home behind my back, even with good intentions, and particularly something as essential as a terminal in which you type all sorts of passwords, gets a hard pass from me. But if you don’t mind, I highly recommend it.
by default, it phones home to find updates.
Do you have a source for that? I just did a rough check using nethogs (on my Arch box) and I didn’t see any connections originating from kitty.
I also found this comment from the author mentioning that he wasn’t a fan of automatic updates (which implied it wasn’t a feature).
and no I dont want to do automatic updates, am not a fan of those. If and when you have an issue or want to try new functionality, its just a simple command to update it.
Do you have a source for that?
Yeah, my own eyes: it told me an update was available. That alarmed me enough to look around, and I found a toggle in the config file to disable automatic update checking. It was on by default.
Then I promptly uninstalled it. Too bad, because I really liked it.
EDIT: maybe I wasn’t clear: it doesn’t auto-update, it checks for updates. Slight difference. What bothers me with that is that it does networking operations when a terminal has no business doing any networking at all.
Hmm, sounds like you used a binary build that wasn’t packaged by your distro, which explains why I didn’t see any network traffic from my Kitty which I installed from the Arch repos. The config docs mentions this:
update_check_intervalThe interval to periodically check if an update to kitty is available (in hours). If an update is found, a system notification is displayed informing you of the available update. The default is to check every 24 hours, set to zero to disable. Update checking is only done by the official binary builds. Distro packages or source builds do not do update checking.
Ah right. Well it’s possible, I don’t really remember. That was quite some time ago.
I switched from Alacritty to Wezterm because I wanted ligature support and it’s also written in Rust. I really like it, though it had some issues with Wayland so I had to install a -git package but it’s fixed now. It also has a bunch of features I don’t use so I can’t really talk about those. I you don’t care about ligatures and the features, use Alacritty, it’s really good.
Wez is actually pretty awesome too
I like wezterm a lot but lately have not been impressed with some breaking changes on the main branch. I know its basically a nightly release, but that’s the recommended way to install according to their website. The devs acknowledged it, and recommended using a tiling manager as the fix.
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I’m also on Gnome, but I use Konsole for the ‘Copy Input to Tab’ or ‘Copy Input to All Tabs in window.’ In my use case scenario, it’s super helpful to be able to type or paste a cmd once, and have it populate multiple tabs, or specific tabs in multiple windows. It does take a little tweaking to get it to obey the dark theme settings, but once upon a time I actually created a custom dark theme, just so I could use Konsole on Gnome. Things are much easier these days 😁 I’ll have to check out Tilix, I haven’t heard of it before, but that may be b/c I literally work by myself in the dank dark basement of the building…I don’t think the cleaning crew even knows that I’m down here
Foot but its limited for the averaged user. While it does support most standards its got no ui, configuration is done through a text editor and foots config file.
Personally I like it. Light weight and robust
Kitty is a great choice But I also enjoyed konsole for its SSH Alias’s
One feature foot is missing is ligatures. So if that is important to you, you’ll need to look for an alternative.
The dev of foot is an awesome person though, so that could offset the missing feature for some :-)
I am a boring person and use what my DE gives me by default. Konsole is very good and I also use Yakuake a lot but I will also take a closer look at Kitty.
Kitty, hands down. GPU accelerated; native image protocol implemented by
ranger,neofetch, and more; incredibly customizable; multiplexing with multiple windows and tabs; ligature support; and much moreIf anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]
I have to ssh in to arbitrary systems often and Kitty seemed to have compatibility issues, which I still don’t grok but plainly can’t use
kitty requires its
terminfobe set properly on the remote host. Its best to use the ssh kitten (I have it aliased), though it’s only technically required the first time on any particular box/instance. See this issue in the FAQ: I get errors about the terminal being unknown or opening the terminal failing or functional keys like arrow keys don’t work?I guess my issue is that these are production machines that aren’t really meant to be mutated and I’m generally just pulling diagnostic data off of. Often I’m ssh’d in to a hub machine and jumping in to edge devices, so I couldn’t run ssh kitten if I wanted to. I think I’m probably an edge case, but it is very frustrating.
I found Wezterm to be quite nice.
Same, nice to see it get some love. I’ve tried a whole bunch of them, Wez is also a super nice guy and very active on GitHub.
I’ve been really happy with Kitty.
I have been using https://apps.kde.org/yakuake/ for years. Having the command line available with a simple key combo while not cluttering up any task manager is great.
Me too - I’ll use Konsole if I need to have the results up all the time, but Yakuake is my main terminal.
Honestly, Konsole is fantastic. On Gnome I use Blackbox, on Sway I use Foot, but if you’re on KDE you don’t really get better than Konsole.
Alacritty and Kitty are both terminals I used to use back when I was on i3wm, they’re perfectly usable, but I don’t think the average user will gain any tangible benefit from replacing Konsole.
I’ve been using Terminator for years primarily because it’s portable. It predates a lot of the portable terminals in vogue right now. I haven’t really noticed a difference in using any of the newer ones so I haven’t switched. There’s some endowment effect there and sunk cost dotfiles.
If there’s a good comparison someone knows about that I should scope to understand what I’m missing I’m always curious!
I also exclusively use terminator, I just wish it had ligatures
konsole is fast and reliableI like it
Kitty
