Linux

I just use konsole , which is the default terminal emulator for KDE. I don't need anything fancy, just something basic to run commands, updates, a few scripts, etc.

alacritty

cool-retro-term 😎 to live in retro cyberpunk dreamland

I primarily use Alacritty. I spend quite a lot of time running things that produce ludicrous amounts of output (eg. compiling Android from source). Out of 10 or so terminal emulators I've tested earlier this year, it was the only one that didn't use 100% CPU displaying all that output, staying in the low single digits.

I'd prefer to use Wezterm because I like its lua configuration system and the builtin pane splitting, but with my workload, I still run into issues where its CPU usage shoots to 100% and becomes non-responsive for a while. (That said, it's already a lot better than before. I try to report any issues I can reliably reproduce and Wez has been wonderful about fixing them.)

I use foot together with foot-server. The client opens in less than a millisecond, and I usually have tens of terminal windows open at the same time. Tabbing comes from the window manager.

I ike konsole

Gnome terminal. I don't really care the terminal emulator. What's in the terminal is what's important. The terminal window just needs to be able to resize correctly though.

Anything, but with tmux running inside. You can copy text even in a tty, split the terminal window, detach from and attach to tmux sessions, etc. I will never use a terminal for any moderately complex task without tmux again :)

I use wezterm, but there are many good ones

urxvt. It works good enough and doesn't use much memory.

I almost exclusively use Yakuake nowadays. I like the drop down terminal.

I like my kitty

Personally I've been using gnome-terminal for quite a while and was fairly happy except that I needed to maintain gnome-terminal and libvte patches to get notification support. Having some sort of notification when a long-running command completes is very important to my productivity.

I've been using Konsole but not fully happy.

• No hyperlink support.
• Selection is lost when my prompt updates (I have the time so that I know when I have started commands).

I've been looking at other options but none-of them feel quite right.

Alacritty:

• No unlimited scrollback.

Kitty:

• Selection bug with updating prompt.
• No unlimited scrollback.

Wezterm:

• No unlimited scrollback.

Terminator:

• Has this terminal group bar that I can't get rid of.
• No notification support.

I realize that I am probably going to have to make a compromise (probably just go back to gnome-terminal with patches) but I figured it would be interesting to see what everyone else was using and make sure I didn't miss something.

To me the important features are:

1. Unlimited scrollback.
2. Notification support (ideally with the 777 Notify command, but if the terminal bell can make a notification that is fine).
3. Clean UI. (I don't use tabs so need to be able to hide the tab bar)
4. Hyperlink support.

foot is great. Simple, fast, and customisable enough for my needs.

I use Kitty, because it works well on both X and Wayland, and is GPU accelerated. For some reason, Alacritty doesn't display the fonts properly (Displays them much smaller on Wayland. Only program I have such issues with)

Also Kitty is more widely packaged (for example on Debian based distros)

I'm using foot since I've installed sway and it's just fine ..not a super user to evaluate well

Alacritty for me

Kitty has awesome framerates, easily hitting 90fps pushing 150k - 180k per frame. Alacrity is also dope.

Alacritty is great, but I switched to wezterm due to ligatures support

Yakuake, I can't use anything other than a quake based terminal. Because of my work I need 24/7 quick access to a terminal, yakuake is just that

kitty

Terminator is the one I've been using for a while

Zutty, the Zero-cost Unicode Teletype which the developer describes as "A high-end terminal for low-end systems".

Tilix

Anything that supports solarized dark and solarized light theming. It is so much less eyestrain

Yakuake. I've been using it for more than a decade and love it.

Whatever gets me connected to my tmux session over ssh

xfce4-terminal has transparency and warns when I'm about to paste multiple lines to it.

While y'all here:

is there a terminal emulator that has "modern" text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z...

Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character..

alacritty. the only downside for me is no ligatures

I recommend black box. https://flathub.org/apps/com.raggesilver.BlackBox it is the nicest and most intergrated terminal on gnome and I use it daily and have zero issues

I love wezterm, primarily because it is cross platform. The most important factor to me is being able to use the same one on Windows, Mac and Linux, because I use all three on a regular basis and don't want to maintain multiple configs. However, wezterm currently has a bug that prevents it from opening on Wayland+Nvidia which forces me to use something else on Linux. None of the other ones get close imo.

Been using kitty for a while now, though honestly any terminal emulator works for me.

Wezterm, which does everything, with a great developer behind it.

Second choice is Konsole: super solid and great rendering.

Aaand tmux with either of those.

xterm. Simple. Gets the job done.

Kitty with catppuccin and 50%-ish transparency. Works like a charm. And also if you add something like what kitti3 does (look it up on github), will be even better.

St with few patches and personal customizations is amazing.

I rather enjoy Tilix. It can tile a single tab without tmux and it can also give special handling to links matched from regexps. I use it to go from Python stacktraces to correct line in Emacs with just a click. It can also do Quake-like terminal, which I use alot.

The project is looking for maintainers, though, so it's possible at some point I need to start looking for alternatives..

st. LukeSmithxyz's fork specifically.

St

St, Xterm, Terminator - depends on hardware and os.

I'm most comfortable when my window manager and terminal emulator are well integrated and keyboard centric.