Top 5 Terminal Emulators

[@bw_merlin]

I really appreciate you showing the install commands for each terminal. Such a simple little thing makes a world of difference to beginners.

[@DavidEsotica]

I love that this man can talk for nearly 30 minutes about something as fundamental as a terminal emulator.

[@jagjotsingh5200]

😂😂 Was thinking the same.

[@nodidog]

Exactly what I thought too. I saw the title and thought 'yeah, I've got 5 minutes', and then I saw the video length 😂

[@armynyus9123]

but he covered well below 1% of what would be to say about them.

[@pfcrow]

I'm still using good old xterm, and it really works great. It can take a bit of customization to get things right. I tend to prefer to have lots of terminal windows instead of multiplexing within a single one, but if I feel like multiplexing, I can run tmux inside the terminal. Now what would be a killer feature for a terminal emulator would be to have it be tmux-aware, so it would make tmux sessions managed by the terminal emulator, complete with mouse clicks to switch panes, click and drag to resize, drop-down window selection, etc. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do that, but anyone developing a terminal program should consider that.

[@noam65]

I've just switched to Tilix, and I'm loving it much more than Terminator. It just fits the way I do things more naturally. Settings and menus are easier to find, offer more options, including title bar names, to keep track of what system I'm working on, for example. Thanks Jay!

[@leodionisiolima]

Bro speaks so calmly, that makes understanding PERFECT

[@spaceguybob]

My personal favorites are in this order. Konsole, Cool-retro-term, Kitty, Gnome terminal. Those are the only few I've really used

[@gimcrack555]

I mainly like all the default one's in each DE. Outside the DE default one's I like Terminator and Sakura. I mainly use xfce4-terminal one. Since I'm using Xfce as my DE. The only one I really don't care much about is terminology(to busy for me).

[@spaceguybob]

@@gimcrack555 I should try Sakura out. Is it a minimal one like ST or is it customizable like konsole, kitty, yakuake, etc?

[@donaldwilliams6821]

I love cool retro term! haha Reminds me of my old days! haha It's a bit of a resource hog though. :(

[@Nikolai508]

Cool retro term is excellent lol. I use Linux Mint and Cinnamon comes with Gnome Terminal, I've found that to be the best terminal for me.

[@spaceguybob]

@@Nikolai508 the default is often three best for many. Like my use of Konsole because it is default on KDE plasma

[@aboutfoss]

You missed a big Terminator feature! The ability to broadcast commands across multiple terminal windows.

[@theunclemez]

Thank you for this video Jay Tilix is now my default terminal emulator, i'm running Solus 4.3 Budgie on this small laptop and it was easy to easy to remove gnome-terminal and switch to tilix which I appreciate, it offers a lot of options and that cool ... also removing it broke no dependency so I should be fine and have no issue for a long time Thanks !

[@misaelpereira9679]

Hey Bro, i like your intro, pretty clean!

[@Aviduduskar]

Nice, I prefer kitty over Alacritty since it aims to replace tmux and offered more control over font spacing.

[@ash1kh]

Hey jay, awesome tips regarding terminal emulator. I am in love with tilix honestly. Built in tmux. So work ready out of the box. The only problem i faced was detecting which portion of the split pane is active. To solve the issue i applied dimming on inactive slight a bit. So when moving with alt, unfocused pane dimmed and active one remain with default brightness, that gives my eyes a nice visual indication where i am. 👍

[@ronhix1]

Good job man, just what I needed. Terminator was the one I chose. 😁

[@stevewillard8212]

Thanks!

[@marlene5547]

thanks, you've really improved my life!

[@richardwalters9249]

I’m using kitty terminal … and when I SSH onto a HPC system, my custom theme’s font color changes to the point of coming too close to the background color to easily read. I also seem to loose proper execution of my cls=“clear; ls -F” alias. It does nothing now, unless I clobber the environ var: term=kitty-term with term=xterm-256color, I love the customizations one can do with kitty, but some things don’t seem to work correctly, For example, I’d like to reset my nerd font’s bold-italic feature to Light, but that’s not honored … it looks like a heavy font when I try to adjust that to anything at all from “auto” default setting. There is a LOT of settings with kitty. And I’m about a week into it and still figuring things out.

[@WaySensei]

I use alacritty because of the VI mode, it makes searching and scrolling through your history much easier

[@lis6502]

Tilix- when you like i3wm but are afraid to use as daily driver ;p

[@kevinklement2621]

Two features of kitty have kept me with it: (1) It allows you to map Ctl-C so that it copies when text is selected, but send the interrupt signal otherwise; the alacritty dev flatly refuses to implement a similar feature for some paternalistic reason; (2) it supports programming ligatures.The kittydiff and icat "kittens" are cool too.

[@dod_ytent9984]

Also, alacritty has no tabs, and dev refuses to implement it, and also said wont accept any PR of that as well!!

[@linuxramblingproductions8554]

@@dod_ytent9984 can’t you just use tabbed anyway

[@dod_ytent9984]

@@linuxramblingproductions8554 no, its a feature thats there inbuilt in terminal emulators. Alacritty doesnt have that.

[@linuxramblingproductions8554]

@@dod_ytent9984 okay and you can add them it doesn’t have to be built in to the terminal do again who cares

[@dod_ytent9984]

@@linuxramblingproductions8554 i agree, but then it makes it something that I cant just install and use expecting the features that I would from a popular app providing the same functionality. Like though I love tinkering around and breaking and fixing things, I still need to work, and for that I need things to work out of the box, be it a terminal emulator, file manager, window manager, or shell, like i know this might be enraging to some people, but this is why alacritty, openbox, i3 and other wms, zsh, cant be used right after install. So when it comes efficiency and usability it doesnt matter what you can do to the software, cuz hell, given enough time one can just even compile the kernel and use LFS, but that doesnt improve its usability.

[@jackfeng2676]

A very cool video out here, thank you! The thing I don't like about Kitty is the toggling of split windows. Of all the selection implementations I personally hate toggling the most as it's low efficient and counterintuitive, and sometimes if you misclick you need to click a few more times to make it up.

[@betterinbooks]

23:33 the favorite child seems to be tilix

[@dono42]

FYI Alacritty has deprecated YAML configuration for TOML.

[@wisteela]

Excellent video. Subscribed. 👍

[@93davve93]

Alacritty + TMUX is pure love! Other than tiling with TMUX is that you can attach to a running TMUX-server over SSH :)

[@EmileNani]

Tilix and Terminator were my favourites But I've switched to Konsole. A really phenomenal terminal emulator for me

[@AlekseyKzn]

Thanks man, tilix is what i was looking for. It is best of terminal for me i worked on mac in iterm2 a half of year (now back on linux and continue to use mac) and this provides similar expirience (not the same but closer than other)

[@MrGibdos]

Hey Jay, thanks for another awesome video. I don't know if you've seen / heard about MeshCentral. I recently came across it and it's the self-hosted TeamViewer / AnyDesk FOSS alternative I've been looking for for years. Might make for an interesting video.

[@wkurwionanorka]

I think, You should mention also drop-down terminals, like guake or tilda.

[@richardwalters9249]

I’m so spoiled to iterm2 for Mac … that when I went to fedora, sorely disappointed with what’s available. One feature I’m looking for is the ability to auto profile switch when you SSH to a system. With iterm2, I have a profile that allows me to look at the terminal and know whether I’m a normal user, or root on a remote system. Any terminals on Linux systems that do that ? Working on eight different HPC systems as normal user or root in identical path directories can be confusing without those profile visual ques.

[@jjdorr2]

Unless im missing the point, one way to do that is customize your command prompt in the command shell (generally bash) to show your [user@system]. You can customize all-kinds of things. Then that info shows up no matter what terminal emulator you use.

[@Antiwasserstoff]

You didn't mention urxvt's feature of tabs and also its daemon

[@bertnijhof5413]

I love Tilix too and I use it in each installation and VM. However I hate short-cuts, since my brain storage is very limited. I even use Tilix in VMs with 1GB of memory, so I don't understand the term "heavy" with respect to any terminal.

[@javadkazemi5063]

i really like your new look with the beard man!

[@NekoiNemo]

Alacrity sounds nice... I just wish they picked any other config format bu the crappy one that depends on whitespaces.

[@georgelabonte2258]

What's the diff btwn rxvt and urxvt? I typically use alacrity, but may have to try kitty to compare. I also like screen for sessions to remote servers.

[@uladzimirkireyeu9041]

Hey! My terminal of choice was Tilda before it started crashing 'cause I just love to have a tiling-window-looking terminal on my system. Besides, what is this cool feature when you are just searching for an app from your desktop, how to do that?

[@ArcaneWorkshop]

Tilix and Terminator? Were these meant to sound like "Telix" and "Terminate" the old school DOS based modem software we used to call BBS's back in the 90's?

[@10tronic]

Alacritty used to have the posibillity to customize and create tabs but i dont know the actual reaseon but in the last release the options changes and the file is not anymore a .yml is instead a .toml

[@meowcula]

I use Alacritty myself and love it. I sync the config file using syncthing and symlink it in to my .config on my linux machines and to my macs as well. Its minimallness really suits the tiling window managers I often use, so glad to not have gui menus or window decorations that I don't want. You're right though, yaml is an annoying format. I don't know why it's so widely used for config files.

[@phanta5m]

Set up some indenter or yaml checker and it is easier to config yaml than json, imo

[@gg-gn3re]

I've used terminator for at least 10 years if not more. I always try to keep up and see if there are better ones but still doesn't look like there are lol

[@wambamcamcam]

How did you get that cool glow on your Tilix terminal?

[@joshzackeroff9220]

Ok here's the deal. Copying and pasting in a terminal on windows is not cool. I'm so used to doing a CTRL+SHIFT+C (or V) for paste. Also why does putty think it's a good idea to right click to paste? Just weird. Every single terminal emulator on windows seems to do a SIGINT or SIGBREAK (eg. a CTRL+C in windows gives you the "^C"). Not cool if you have a line of text already keyed in with a command and need to append something at the end that is way to long to type. Alacratty does this. CTRL+SHIFT+C (or V) WORKS!!! Thanks!. Didn't know about alacratty until today. Will be using this for my powershell emulator from now on just because the copy/paste shortcuts don't screw things up. Glad I came across your channel. Never watched you before but if one of your videos can fix a copy/paste issue that I've been dealing with coming from linux to windows (dealing with this for like 20 years) . You can bet your ass I'll be checking your channel out frequently! Thanks for posting this!

[@pfcrow]

Unix has been using mouse buttons to cut and paste since the 80s. Left to select, Right to extend selection, and Middle to paste. I would expect that behavior on almost any Linux program.

[@calyodelphi124]

I just went to look up Alacritty and literally within the past year since this video was published, they have released a MINOR release (0.13.0) that changes which format the config file uses from YAML to something called TOML that is just Windows INI file format but slightly reimagined! You would THINK that this would have come with a bump in major release since this breaks the config file API entirely and forces a port of configurations from YAML to TOML but apparently not I guess!

[@harunjonuzi]

What does he use to open apps like the Spotlight on mac?

[@somebodyoncetoldme1704]

Looking for a terminal emulator that lets you change position of the cursor with the mouse, highlight text with the mouse, and delete/copy/cut highlighted text. You know, like any text editor let's you do at least since I was born...

[@cristiancastro1565]

Where did you get the proxmox sticker?

[@boy_with_thorn]

alacritty has some kind of bug when I set transparency, it has happened to others but I havent found a solution

[@PS_Tube]

Nice choices. I removed default gnome terminal with gnome-terminal-fedora. I had Terminator installed, but I rarely need it.

[@romeritobrandao1634]

Did you know any terminal that configure theme color by regex ? If yes what ?

[@zauliuz]

I personally like tilix. There is awesome feature ( i think others also have it) where i can enter same command in to multiple "windows" for example connect to multiple servers via ssh and run same command in all of them at once. I think you didn't mentioned that. Also another terminal what i like is tmux. :)

[@gg-gn3re]

Yea terminator has it too, very niche usage though

[@ButImFeelingMuchBetterNow]

Tilix was included as the default emulator in Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 that I just installed on my laptop.

[@garciajero]

re-tilix , use tmux like most people out there , tilis is a massive overkill for splits. Tmux has a ton of other features that don't trigger gtk re-draws in every action.

[@bologna3048]

Kitty is on the list, yesssssssssss lol i use it with Awesome, went for it because it can render images really well, however it's a pain for ssh-ing into remote servers if the server doesn't have kitty also installed.

[@adityaranigaon]

Kitty is good. But try running tmux with a heavy build process and screen freezes. Didn't face the issue with Terminator

[@usmansiddique1515]

Can anyone tell what tiling manager is he using?

[@rapanotti]

Not awesome but Yakuake is very useful as a drop-down terminal emulator.

[@PhayzinOut]

Doesn't Yakuake fall under the Konsole category?

[@rapanotti]

@@PhayzinOut Yakuake claims: A drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology. I liked the drop-down offered by MX-Linux.

[@ButImFeelingMuchBetterNow]

I use Yakuake more than anything else.

[@SunilSah-eo7si]

Can you please explain about LX terminal

[@GafftheHorse]

Another feature of rxvt-unicode I like is the daemon (urxvtd and urxvtc), save even more system resources.

[@Mythologos]

Guake, Vterm and CRT just for fun.

[@bignout3205]

Terminator is the one I use. It’s really good!

[@progCan]

great vid though tilix and terminator is just tmux + some UI - dethatching. i would prefer a very fundamental and important feature of tmux over just UI. Oh also tmux can run in any terminal emulator (and ssh sessions).

[@fynderde]

Where is wezterm? :-)

[@TheZakarumite]

oh, i didnt recognize you :) this looks good

[@TurntableTV]

Love the beard, Jay!

[@TimothyGott]

I like the beard. I've been sporting mine for about four years or so. Retirement from the corporate world looks good on you 😁

[@FeedScrn]

I prefer top to htop many times because top shows the program names running for each process more plainly.

[@gg-gn3re]

You can customize htop lists any way you want in it's settings

[@FeedScrn]

@@gg-gn3re - Oh. Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out.

[@tenj00]

you misssed the best one.: st (simple terminal).

[@boy_with_thorn]

you could have showed them with the fullscreen option and transparency

The first one is clearly superior

[@TlatoaniItzcoatl]

love the kirby sticker

[@chrismacaber4531]

Terminator ftw 🤘 (no movie joke, I really mean the Terminal Emulator 😅)

[@TheLonelyMoon]

I personally prefer Kitty for their image support

[@DavidWilde1]

C'mon man! No terminal discussion is complete without some cool-retro-term.

[@-ht]

for windows the best one i have used so far is git bash terminal

[@bytemunch_]

Couldn't focus, uneven spacing on the canvasses behind you. Jk, good spotlight on options for terminal emulators. I use Terminator because I can paste into it easily, typing git URLs by hand is not the one.

[@fubaralakbar6800]

Cool Retro Term : )

[@dragonek_gnu_linux_pl]

tilix is mymain terminal emulator for daily use, sometimes use gnome-terminal and on i3-gaps rxvt but tilix is my nr 1

[@kalifornia909]

i wish alacritty had multiplexing by default and i didnt have to use tmux on top of it

[@nikolaikiselev253]

cool staf! Thanks a lot!

[@ruprecht9997]

GNU screen runs inside a terminal emulator and on the console. ^A-C to create new session / shell ^A-N to cycle to next session ^A-| to make to panes horizontally next to each other ^A-TAB to move between panes ^A-? for help That's all I use. Nice when connecting to remote servers via SSH. Keyboard shortcuts only.

[@wasted5742]

Terminator is no longer maintained and the maintainer suggests that you use alacritty.

[@matyasmarkkovacs8336]

Huh? Latest release was on may 30 It's active...

[@miyalys]

Nice video, and great suggestions! Kitty doesn't itself support vim shortcuts in that case, it likely opens the config file with $EDITOR so it's literally within vim.

[@yehudahecht1520]

Alacritty is now configured via a TOML file.

[@alessiodellicolli1593]

Whem you have a tiling wm installing a multitab terminal is quite useless

[@LearnLinuxTV]

I can see that

[@Rachet36]

I love the shirt!

[@LearnLinuxTV]

Thank you!

[@marcojoao]

Try Tabby Terminal

[@lis6502]

Actually i've used xfce4-terminal-emulator as my weapon of choice, but i will seriously consider urxvt. After all, looking at your selection there's not much difference and majority of these *ttys just compensate for not-tiled WM.

[@yazanarog6343]

tilix is the best one!

[@khfamdfbjds]

thanks a lot

[@aayush5474]

Nice look with the beard

[@elalemanpaisa]

The first: Use gnome terminal and tmux

[@larsthorwald3338]

I feel sorry for people who don't use screen They miss so much of life.

[@MarkVanderberg]

Guake Terminal

[@sandeepvk]

Why will anyone bother configuring a xresource file in rxvt when other terminal give gui options. Further every system has 16 GB of Ram today so these light weight terminals are redundant imao. rxvt is a quaint anachronism

[@matyasmarkkovacs8336]

Not every system has 16 GB of RAM. Some PCs still use 4Gigs or even less with a very lightweight distro like Puppy Linux, Linux Lite, Artix etc. And that's when the lightweight terminals are the way to go. Plus many people prefer configuring it via file especially those who use tiling window managers. Gui terminals don't look very good on them.

[@paxxous]

I was just searching this up lol

[@Cueteman]

very nice!

[@namesame]

Kitty sucks, WezTerm is way better...

[@Charlie8913]

Ugh, those are all windowed... i find switching focus between such a terminal and another app takes too long. I prefer just pressing a key for a top-down terminal like guake to appear, that's much faster and it's always on the same place on the screen.

[@gg-gn3re]

get a window manager..

[@thomaspiechulek535]

Bashtop is cooler

[@SB-qm5wg]

< Terminator user

[@nevoyu]

RIP termite

[@benjimiles8833]

you are just repeating the same features in every terminal emulator, this video sucks tbh!