Ask Slashdot: What Terminal Emulator Do You Use? 352
An anonymous reader writes: Although I spend a considerable amount of my time at work using shell commands and other text-based applications, I've never really given much thought to what terminal emulator I use. A recent article over on Opensource.com rounded up their picks for their seven favorite terminals, but I'm still unsure if it really matters which one I pick. Do you have a favorite terminal emulator, and if so, what makes it your favorite? I'm interested in hearing about that "one killer feature" that really sold you on your choice.
LXTerminal (Score:3)
Re: LXTerminal (Score:2)
I use either xterm or putty.
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Still using xterm. I used a few that claimed to be "light weight" but they all sucked. Over time, xterm has continued to stay the same size and speed, with the same (rather complete) feature set, while competitors have grown and grown and now xterm is lighter weight than anything with even 50% of the feature set.
# ps ax | grep xterm | grep -v grep | wc -l
15
I don't like tabs because they serve the same purpose as "workspaces" or "virtual desktops" and I can just layout related terms on their own screen. Then
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I mostly don't care what terminal i use (i slightly prefer yakuake) as long as there is a font that looks good and a cursor that doesn't annoy me. I like the default terminal font OS X uses and love the red semitransparent cursor ChromeOS has. In fact, ChromeOS terminal also has a good font but OSX's is better. Does anybody know the name of that font?
The other font i'd want in my terminals is the pre-framebuffer-era vty font we all used. What's was that called?
ZOC (Score:4, Interesting)
ZOC is hands down my favorite terminal emulator.
Best emulation, including ANSI. Full scrollback buffers. Zmodem support. Runs on OS/2 *AND* OS X. Love it.
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Re:ZOC (Score:4, Interesting)
OMG... ZOC is still around? I haven't used that since... well... since I used OS/2 Warp 2.1
And they still use REXX! http://www.emtec.com/zoc/
xterm vs. gnome-terminal (Score:3)
xterm brags [invisible-island.net] that they have the most faithful emulation of the DEC vt100/220/320/420/520 state machines of any implementation on the market.
I have Cygwin on my office Windows PC, and when I have to work with a VAX or otherwise use a complete and faithful terminal emulation, I use xterm.
If xterm had tabs, I would never use anything
Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
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wmic
You're Welcome.
SecureCRT (Score:2)
I've never understood the appeal of Quake-style drop-downs. The last thing I need is quick command at chat speed, and, as a server sysadmin there's usually nothing interesting on my laptop/desktop to begin with -- I'm administering servers that are out there doing stuff.
For Windows (and OS X, finally), I've gotten accustomed to SecureCRT's interface and tend to find it the most comfortable. SecureFX is a little less reliable on the Mac (I prefer CyberDuck or another more Mac-like client), but its integratio
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A drop down terminal is super helpful when switching back and forth between the terminal and documentation in a browser window.
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This is more of a Linux thing, Windows users are mostly locked to the OS-provided console UI,
I use Cygwin on Windows, and most often I use xterm running under Cygwin's X Server. I use xterm mainly out of habit, cause that's what I always used back in the day on Unix and later on Linux systems.
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That's how I did it for years, until mintty came out. Now I'm an unabashed mintty fanboy.
Re:Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
ConEmu is a godsend. The configuration options are kind of intricate, but it's awesome to have a cmd/powershell window that acts like every other GUI terminal emulator (like putty) has since forever.
It runs portable, so if I do a consulting gig that involves a metric assload of powershell I can run ConEmu on the client systems without doing an install and just blow it away when I'm done.
I'm kind of puzzled at why when MS came out with PowerShell they stuck to the same crappy console window that cmd.exe used. You'd have thought they would have gained a lot more adoption momentum if there was a gee-whiz new terminal window that came with it.
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Actually, as a Windows user I tend to go out and install the msys [mingw.org] version of bash on any system I'm going to be doing serious work on. A lot of people prefer Cygwin's bash, but the licensing on msys is nicer, and all you really lose is some POSIX stuff that isn't all that important unless you are trying to perform a Unix port of something. Most of the official gcc compiler installs for Windows use msys/mingwin.
If you don't mind learning a bunch of stuff that's only valid on today's flavor of Windows, I un
Re:Windows (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm ... cmd.exe is a command line shell.
But cmd.exe is NOT a terminal emulator, not by a long shot.
A terminal emulator [wikipedia.org], oddly enough, emulates terminals ... VT52, VT102, IBM 3270, and a bunch of other things. You know, like the old school real physical terminals.
So, sorry, but no. cmd.exe is NOT a suitable answer to "what terminal emulator do you use". It's simply not even in the same family as a terminal emulator.
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Please resize your window, without having to guess what the number of columns and rows you need.
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PowerShell? You mean that scripting language that can't even run unsigned scripts by defaults? .CMDs.
No thanks, I will stick to
Looking for a good one is hard (Score:2)
This is harder than I would have thought. I'm working on a custom build of NetBSD for a project, for desktop use of a sort. Trying to find one that isn't part of some other DE (which is fine, but I'd rather have one that doesn't rely on a bunch of libraries that are only installed so I can sue it), AND has tab, unicode and transparency support is hard. I still haven't found a decent one, although have a few more to search through.
In the meanwhile, I'm using tilde and xterm.
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Part of my criteria was that it is not from another DE. Isn't LXterminal from LXDE?
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If you could articulate WHY you demand that it not be part of a DE, it would be helpful.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia is your friend. "LXTerminal is the standard terminal emulator of LXDE. The terminal is a desktop-independent VTE-based terminal emulator for LXDE without any unnecessary dependency. "
LXTerminal 0.2.0 dependencies [linuxfromscratch.org]: Vte-0.28.2. PERIOD.
Appears to me that there is no rational reason to discount it. You don't have to load LXDE to get LXTerminal.
The Entire Subject Article is Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Every candidate they list is a local console application using a local framebuffer desktop system.
Real terminal emulators are network detached from a headless server system.
I use PuTTY SSH from Windows, command-line OpenSSH from a native (non-graphical) console for Linux, or VxConnectBot on my Android phone (which has a slider keyboard).
Sometimes I'll actually use an old-school serial-port terminal emulator on an old Amiga to connect to my "desperation serial port" console on my home server. Weird how that thing will be working when must network-based ttys are down.
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I'll have to check it out, but just for reference, PuTTY can save session logs or configuration parameters and there is a command line associated program psftp for an sftp client along with a handful of other handy things in the suite.
Personally though, I prefer KiTTY for the transparency and system tray options. For a GUI SFTP/FTP/FTPS/Whatever client, I use WinSCP.
aterm ! (Score:2)
Wires are the best terminal (Score:4, Funny)
Terminals are lame. I like being close to the machine, so I wired the serial port right into auditory nerve. I had to drop the bitrate to 7-O-3 to get it to work reliably.
I'm still working on the input part. It's hard to concentrate on input when the damn thing is blasting your ear every few microseconds with noise.
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Try lamps and toggle switches, they're the proven way.
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What if you rig it so that you send XON/XOFF signals when you cough?
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What if you rig it so that you send XON/XOFF signals when you cough?
CTS/DTR is much more reliable. Software flow control is fragile.
XTerms are still useful (Score:3)
Defaults unless they suck (Score:3)
Defaults that work well give me no incentive to change...so gnome-terminal (known as mate-terminal on most of my systems) and osso-xterm.
tty (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you're on a PC, that's still a virtual terminal, emulating a terminal.
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You can have a dozen terminal windows on screen (OK, it's usually only 3 to 5 for me.) Each with multiple tabs, each tab running tmux. Yay.
konsole for the record but it doesn't matter much.
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Obligatory xkcd (Score:2)
Real programmers use butterflies: https://xkcd.com/378/ [xkcd.com]
xterm (Score:2)
xshell 4 (Score:2)
xshell 4
Because all the things.
Guake, baby (Score:3)
Guake [wikipedia.org] is the first thing I install on a new distro. Terminal drop-down is only a keypress away.
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every time i run gnome, i eventually start missing yakuake, so i install guake. and i'm always disappointed. inability to resize on the fly (with key combo), inability to split terminal horizontally and vertically, inability to rename tabs to something meaningful (and for the tab names to STAY that way).
color_xterm (Score:2)
I'm still using good old xterms when on Unix. They're super stupid fast, they use basically no memory, and you can change the font size quicker than with any other terminal in which you don't sometimes change it by accident by mashing keys.
If there's a terminal icon already in whatever launcher, though, I generally just use it until it pisses me off
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I'm still using good old xterms when on Unix. They're super stupid fast, they use basically no memory
Memory usage by a terminal emulator can hardly be a deciding factor these days, can it? Just checked my work box, and gnome terminal is using ~45Mb out of 32Gb, even with god-knows-how-many terminal tabs open. It's not going to break the bank ...
Come to think of it -- does anyone know of a terminal emulator with Tree Style Tabs?? That would be a true killer feature for me.
Konsole (Score:5, Informative)
All things being equal, I prefer KDE's Konsole. It has all the features I need or want (tabs, profiles, easy customization) and fits well in the KDE environment.
If I'm using a simple window manager, I go for rxvt because it's lightweight and still hits most of the feature list.
What I actually use the most is Putty thanks to the fact that I'm at work and Windows doesn't include a sane set of utilities.
The hall of shame award goes to Apple's Terminal.app. Horrible handling of the bash key shortcuts.
RXVT (Score:2)
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Same here. The other thing I like with Konsole is the shortcut for switching tabs is Shift+ which is very quick to hit.
Honestly as long as you give me tabs and the ability to type I'm pretty happy.
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Funny, when I hit shift+ in Konsole, it just prints "+".
Depends... (Score:3)
For just opening a terminal on my desktop/laptop, I'm using the default mate-terminal (I run Mint w/ MATE).
However, when I'm coding (usually PHP stuff) I use Kate as my editor, and it can use konsole as a terminal at the bottom of the editor. Instead of toggling back and forth between windows, or even switching my focus from one to another on my dual monitor setup, I can see webserver error logs or whatever right there in the editor.
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Can you recommend a good IDE for PHP ?
Personally, having a LAMP setup on localhost, with a good text editor (syntax highlighting, multiple docs, etc) and some way of watching the apache error log (hence the konsole terminal at the bottom of kate) is fine for what I do.
But if there is a free IDE that I can Just Use without having to change my work flow, etc. I'm always open to suggestions
GTKTerm for talking to embedded appliances (Score:2)
PuTTy (Score:4, Interesting)
PuTTy. It isn't a "terminal emulator" in the sense that it is the terminal for the local machine. It is used for connecting to all those remote headless servers out there. I'm personally locked into Windows on my workstation for the time being due to other Windows only software requirements, so this is a good bridging application to access all the Linux, FreeBSD, vSphere, and SmartOS machines that I work with.
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Does it support smart card based authentication? This is one of the main reasons I'm on PuTTy now is because my company switched to using USB based smart cards and passwordless authentication.
mintty on cygwin (Score:2)
On Linux, I don't know. Tried to upgrade my Linux box a couple weeks ago and got the message "your video chip is no longer supported". Sure nuff, it won't go into GUI mode. Haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.
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Same here. If you set LANG=....UTF-8 Unicode is rendered using common programs like ls and less, but sadly not vi.
Kermit (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit... [columbia.edu]
Gnu Emacs (and xterm or whatever) (Score:2)
M-x shell in emacs for anything long-running, or where you need copy-paste. M-x rename-buffer lets you run several shells in one emacs. If you have a file opened with tramp e.g. open a file named "/user@other-host:/etc/that-config-file" (i.e. ssh to another system) , M-x shell will launch on that host (at least in recent versions).
Also other shell-based interfaces like mysql, tclsh will usually have their own mode, launced with e.g. M-x sql-mysql .
Emacs does not like ncurses-based apps, so then Xterm needs
mrxvt.. but I can't use it :( (Score:2)
I love the broadcast feature of mrxvt because there are a number of situations I get into where it's just handy to control 20 different machines with the same keypresses.
Unfortunately it doesn't support modern typography like UTF8. So I am using xfce4-terminal which mostly does what I need. Wrote a little script to deal with the broadcasting that leverages pconsole to get me there.
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Are mrxvt and urxvt (RXVT with Unicode support) mutually exclusive?
mrxvt has other rare features too (Score:2)
1. One good feature is - switching to the last used tab. I bind it to ctrl-tab. Most terminal emulators support going to next, previous, nth tab, but last used tab is somewhat rare.
2. If a non-current tab has any activity, its tab icon gets a notification. This feature seems to be missing in much later terminal emulators - e.g. recent releases of gnome-terminal, lxterminal, xfce-terminal. Lilyterm has this feature, though.
The Most Interesting User In the World! (Score:2)
mate-terminal (Score:2)
Input Broadcast is a MUST (Score:3)
If you're a sysadmin or devops engineer (or whatever the popular term for unix admin is these days) you're going to want to be able to broadcast input to groups of terminals.
Terminator (Linux)
iTerm2 (OSX)
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Sure because you have a usecase where sendinging the same commands to n number of servers is the best method? Is this what sysadmins without puppet/chef/etc etc are forced to use. Are you tail tail -f log files as well?
VT100 for lyfe!!!!!! (Score:2)
You can have my VT100 when you pry it from my cold dead hands....
Well, that is if I still had one.
Who am I kidding. I just use whatever comes installed by default. I never did use any really fancy terminal features beyond color displays. XTerm is fine for me. Though I do remember back in the day when the choice would actually affect basic features.
Win, Mac, Linux picks (Score:2)
Windows: PuTTY, followed by Cygwin's own terminal.
MacOS: iTerm. It what the Terminal is supposed to be.
Linux: rxvt-unicode. It's a classic terminal, but it's just a terminal. Nothing more, nothing less. XTerm is just too bloated.
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Cathode (Score:3)
I use Cathode [secretgeometry.com], a fully-working terminal emulator that visually looks like an old black-and-green CRT monitor.
I like OS X best when it's running Cathode at full-screen. I use the demo version, that starts sputtering and flaking more and more over time. So that fucking $3500 company-issued MacBook with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and 2,8 GHz quad-core Intel i7 looks nothing more than a flickering and dying pile of barely glowing phosphorous horse-shit.
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i've tried cathode. once the novelty wore off and there were no more people around to show it off to, i stopped using it because of the same reasons we stopped using flickering monochrome CRT monitors.
Re: Cathode (Score:2)
Totally agree, the novelty quickly wore off. I use iTerm2; whenever I get a fresh install of OS X, I run my installation script. It consists of a bunch of calls to "brew install" and " brew cask install". iTerm gets installed as one of the first.
SecureCRT FTW (Score:2)
I work as a consultant and I have to use Windows as my primary OS due to software requirements. I also have to manage session data for hundreds of customers, and even more devices, so I choose SecureCRT. It lets me store sessions in a tree structure and also has the ability to store credentials (use with care) and automate logins via functionality similar to expect.
just plain old xterm, with this (Score:2)
xterm*font: -xos4-terminus-bold-r-normal-*-28-*-*-*-*-*-*-* xterm*saveLines: 2000 xterm*foreground: rgb:ff/ff/ff xterm*background: rgb:00/00/00 xft.dpi: 120 xft.hinting:1
Vista TN3270 (Score:2)
rxvt (Score:2)
Emacs M-x shell (Score:2)
Killer feature is: run a command with 40 pages of output; do incremental backwards search to jump to different things. (Optionally copy a section of output and paste into another Emacs buffer.) All without having to touch the mouse.
Many people don't realize how much time they waste visually scanning lengthy output without that feature (and grep is frequently not a good substitute for searching.)
RealTerm (Score:2)
Stuck in Windows world... (Score:2)
So for various unfortunate reasons, I've recently had to have Windows on my system. I struggled a long time before settling on my strategy:
Install latest git for windows, git bash comes with the right sort of mintty with a shell that behaves sane with respect to Windows conventions while having bash. I go into settings and enable the ctl-shift shortcuts and off I go. No tabs, but otherwise makes me not miss the Linux terminals as badly.
Things I tried but did not like:
PuTTY: Obviously, no local capabilit
mintty (Score:2)
I use mintty with Cygwin on Windows 7. mintty was originally developed from PuTTY. It's clean and robust. It recently got a new maintainer and started seeing updates, and the new maintainer added in my favorite removed feature that I had asked about 3-4 years ago. I use it all the time at home and at work.
Emulator my ass (Score:2)
That's not a terminal. Now THIS is a terminal:
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/40th/i... [uwaterloo.ca]
DECterm (Score:2)
DECterm: the closest to a VT320 you can get on X11
Emulator? Pfffft... (Score:2)
The few times I need a terminal emulator, I fire up my VT220. Yes, I do it for shits and giggles - though it does work wonderfully well and has a very comfortable "UI".
From this you can conclude that I don't do computers as a job, since a VT220 would not be exactly ultra-portable ;)
Tabbed terminal plus tmux (Score:2)
Once I started using GNOME 2.x I started using Gnome Terminal. I quickly grew to love having a terminal emulator with multiple tabs. I am still using it (well, now it's MATE Terminal) but I also use tmux to have multiple windows per tab.
Each tab is a different computer. Tab 1 is generally the local computer upon which I am working; then tabs 2 through whatever are the various remote machines. I ssh to the remote machine, then run tmux and open as many windows as I need.
tmux is essential so that I can pi
Whatver, but set the font & colors (Score:2)
My favorite is whatever but se the font to OCR-A and the colors to green on black... ahhhh. much better :-)
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What about terminal emulating apps?
https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
JuiceSSH is a nice terminal app (Score:5, Interesting)
I use JuiceSSH on my phone, which is amazingly useful more often than it should be necessary. It falls fairly low on that link, for some reason, so maybe I should check the others out.
puTTY on Windows.
Otherwise I'm connected directly to a linux box and just SSH out from a native command line. I don't tend to boot into X unless really necessary, and then I'm normally just stuck with xterm until I can get out of it.
And I don't know when the last time I had to terminal from an apple product is, so I don't even know any more for that one.
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Thanks for the suggestion, I will check that out. I have been using ConnectBot, and it works ok, but I am always open to possible better methods.
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I use ConnectBot with Hacker's Keyboard and that combination does everything I need to do on a phone. I seem to recall checking out JuiceSSH too, but I can't remember why I chose ConnectBot.
Re: JuiceSSH is a nice terminal app (Score:2)
I'll put in another nod to JuiceSSH on the phone. Minimalistic for the most part, but that secondary keyboard that pops up has exactly what you need that phone keyboards don't while being easily hidden when you don't need it.
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I'm dissappointed. I was hoping to hear about COWs next great adventure!
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I use Terminator primarily as well. Nice and useful plugins for it.
I also use tilda bound to F12 for long term, persistent commands, that I want to check on occasionally. VPN connections, etc. It's simple to use, and has a very minimal foot print.
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I looked up some pictures and caught myself moving my head to remove the glare...the memories.
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I also highly recommend Moba XTerm, at least if your main machine is Windows.
A brief selection of features:
* Tabs. Yes, tabs! After years of using Putty, tabs are amazing.
* Integrated X11 server. No having to fuss with Cygwin and all that; it just works and automatically does the forwarding for you.
* Local *NIX functionality, again, without having to deal with Cygwin manually.
* Free (as in beer).
* Also supports VNC, RDP, (S)FTP.
* Mirroring of input to multiple sessions.
It's a great little piece of software.
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Yep, I tend to prefer the default keybindings on konsole (particularly shift+Left/Right to switch tabs) and theme handling. ...but I do so on Ubuntu with Unity (and there I go losing my street cred--I actually like Unity :-/ ).
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/bin/ksh (korn shell)
/bin/tcsh (t shell)
/bin/bash (default - bourne again shell)
/bin/sh (not bourne shell but bourne-again shell (bash) - it's not symlinked though which is interesting)
You can change it via the chsh command just like any other unix OS or if you feel like pointing and clicking your way there, you can edit Terminal.app's preferences.
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Interesting to note that Mac OS X's default shell was tcsh. I forget which version changed to bash.
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On OS X, you can run iTerm, which I've used and liked for years now. Recommended, especially if you have to actually emulate some particular terminal setup.