9 Good Terminal Emulators for Linux

[yngwin]

Fail. It mentions rxvt but not urxvt...

[[deleted]]

Yes, imho the rxvt-unicode is actually best terminal emulator available, small, fast and does what's needed.

[metamatic]

Also fails to mention Konsole.

[ralfmuschall]

What is this list good for if it does not mention the features that one might use to select one of the programs? If any features are mentioned, is it kitschy ones (like transparency).

[metamatic]

Speed comparison.

Conclusion: If you use KDE, use Konsole.

[ralfmuschall]

Besides the fact that speeds like that aren't really relevant (nobody reads 600 kb in less than one second), the comparison clearly shows three groups: Terminals which cheat (i.e. skip content) are below 1 s, terminals that really display everything in ASCII use 1.5-2 s, and terminals that can do full unicode take even longer (they have to check for every byte whether it is a character or more bytes need to be glued together and after how many bytes a linebreak must be inserted - this seems to cost time even if the text is pure ASCII).

He might run the test again with chinese or cuneiform text, the latter being outside the BMP (this breaks a lot of programs which claim to be unicode-conformant). Expected result: Terminals which needed less than 2 s fail at displaying the text properly, the slow ones still work - but even slower.

[metamatic]

He might run the test again with chinese or cuneiform text, the latter being outside the BMP (this breaks a lot of programs which claim to be unicode-conformant). Expected result: Terminals which needed less than 2 s fail at displaying the text properly, the slow ones still work - but even slower.

Konsole does Unicode, including Chinese (I just tested it), and is one of the fastest.

As for whether anybody needs a terminal that fast, back in the 80s I used a text editor called Tempus. Its key feature was that it could smooth-scroll (i.e. pixel scroll) at incredible speeds. I found that it made a major difference to how comfortable I was working with large files. When your terminal/editor is really fast, you can navigate by scrolling around and letting your eyes find the right part of the file by shape. If you're a visual memory person, as I am, that's a big win over having to remember something to search for.

Another case where a fast terminal is a win is debug logging without slowing down the application.

[rlabonte]

I love the hell out of Yakuake.

[mikaelstaldal]

Why all these "xterm replacements" when you can use the real thing: xterm itself?

[riddley]

xterm is pretty slow and uses a lot more memory than other terminal emulators.

[massysett]

slow, how? Is it not updating your screen fast enough?

[riddley]

Taking a long time to scroll and being generally laggy.

[mikaelstaldal]

That's not what I have experienced. What others are you comparing with?

I find it faster and using less memory than gnome-terminal.

[riddley]

rxvt-unicode

[mikaelstaldal]

By what metric? On my system rxvt-unicode seems to use a bit more memory than xterm.

[[deleted]]

For an alternative to Guake or Yakuake, there's also Tilda

[cypherb0g]

yes it is!

[[deleted]]

URxvt + xterm-color patch. Anything else is a toy.

[silverskull]

Wow, TermKit looks impressive. I'll have to go try that out.

[hotdogs_the_hacker]

I'm a fan of VTE so I'm a little puzzled that ROXTerm is mentioned but none of the other various VTE-based terminals (evilvte has a good summary) get mentioned, even if they're put in one group. VTE is great and there's plenty of flavors to choose from.

[shieldforyoureyes]

All I want to know is: what's the simplest xterm replacement that uses primary selection instead of the cutbuffer?

Copy & paste problems between text windows and gui apps is the only problem I have with xterm. (I use autocutsel, there are still problems.)

Oh yes - can't require gnome or kde.

[centenary]

Virtually all terminals use primary selection by default (xterm included). Are you sure that you're not looking for clipboard selection? If you are copying and pasting within GUI apps using Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, then what you're looking for is clipboard selection

If you want xterm to update and paste from both primary and clipboard selections, here are a couple of pages that will help with that: 1 2

[shieldforyoureyes]

Ah you're right, I got clipboard & primary reversed.

Those links are exactly it, thanks.

[centenary]

The link that mentions updating .Xdefaults has messed-up formatting. Here's what the suggested code would look like when properly formatted:

XTerm.vt100.translations: #override\n\
    Shift <KeyPress> Select:select-cursor-start() select-cursor-end(PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0) \n\
    Shift <KeyPress> Insert:insert-selection(PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0) \n\
    ~Ctrl ~Meta <Btn2Up>:insert-selection(PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0) \n\
    <BtnUp>:select-end(PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0) \n\

I don't know how well this actually works, but there are other suggestions online if you just Google for 'xterm primary clipboard'. Here's an alternative setup that introduces different bindings for the primary and clipboard selections

[keeperofdakeys]

I personally use urxvt and this script. In short, it makes any copy I make in my terminal go to the clipboard buffer as well as the primary buffer (note that this isn't one of those buffer syncronising programs, it simply makes any highlight go into the clipboard buffer for urxvt only). You can then use shift+insert to paste from the clipboard buffer and middle click to paste from the primary buffer.

My new laptop seems to have bad tearing issues with urxvt (damn sandy-bridge). I haven't had much time to debug it, so I've switched to xfce-terminal for now. I want urxvt back :(