Like the question above am I just an old man that’s not keeping up with the times or is terminator still a great terminal to use in 2025?
What’s its advantages over Terminator? Does it have any?
GPU-accelerated, likely faster and less mem usage (Python vs Zig), and image rendering.
Afaik terminator is unmaintained but some people still use it. I’ve heard of Tilix as a good alternative but can’t tell you if that’s the case as I haven’t used either. I change terminals only if there’s a feature my current one doesn’t have.
I used alacritty (because that’s what came with the distro I used, ArcoLinux) until I switched to Wayland where alacritty font scaling was inconsistent across Xorg and Wayland sessions (and I was still switching between the two). So I went to kitty, until I was convinced to switch to foot because it seemed to open faster so I went to it. Then I switched to COSMIC which doesn’t let me remove window decorations server-side and neither kitty nor foot supported their removal client side, so I switched to alacritty which did.
I will switch to COSMIC terminal for convenience (as I use COSMIC) when they fix their font rendering (it’s like old Alacritty, only that modern Alacritty has fixed it but cosmic-term still hasn’t).
I have switched from XTerm to Konsole only a year ago.
From a look at the documentation it’s just a fancy terminal. If you don’t really care about theming or image rendering then it’s not something you need. If you’re trying to rice a UI like hyprland then it looks like a good option.
Personally, I don’t see much added value over whatever the default terminal is but I’ve never been one to mess with things that do what they are supposed to.
I use yakuake (or guake if I still used gnome), I love having a consitent terminal slide down the screen every time I press a shortcut, especially if it’s supplememtary to what I’m doing in the graphical shell.
And I love the theming options such as transparency. I fell in love with Yakuake a loooong time ago and still love it ! Autohide on outside click and multiple tabbed terminals in the same super easy access window.
Eh, why would you? They’re fancy looking but if what you use works for you that’s about it.
I’m no connoisseur, but I just want the same feel as I had back in the 90s. No terminal emulator, straight up tty with crisp VGA ROM fonts at some hacky SuperVGA resolution. Before the virtual framebuffer that basically every computer today uses for tty.
Konsole, gnome-terminal and ghostty can all be made to feel right to me. I’m giving ghostty a spin, and I like how it supports custom shaders so I can make it feel even more like home.
I loved terminator but after learning tmux I just don’t really see much point in the main feature. I use xfce4-terminal on i3 these days.
I chose Kitty cause of the name and I have never looked at anything else.
Another happy Kitty user here!
I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.
Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.
Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.
I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.
I switched from terminator to alacritty a while back. Moved to kitty a few months until a bug was fixed. I do try out new terminals occasionally, but nothing feels as nice as alacritty to me so i stay.
Is there a reason to change? I use foot terminal, have also used Alacritty and Kitty previously.
Multiple GNOME terminals in one window!
Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.
terminator sounds great. never heard of it. i did try ghostty, but i can’t help myself opening xfce terminal. muscle memory.
Yeah it’s great I have a hot key super + Enter to open terminator so the mussle memory doesn’t change if I change terminals
Hmm you interested me
I’m an old man. I don’t get the appeal of a terminal with hardware acceleration and all that fancy stuff. I use what the distro/DE came with.
Evidently I’m similarly old, but a lot of the TUI apps replacing old standards look better.
Whatever wezterm uses to render ligatures has made editing quite pleasant, it doesn’t eat random control characters either which I found insufferable in a few that ship with DEs. Its still miles better than the cart, YMMV depending on what you use it for.
I am with you. xfce4-terminal in drop down mode is all I need!
Xfce4-terminal has the quake style drop down mode?
(rushes off to try it)
Exactly. You invoke it with
xfce4-terminal --drop-downIf you set that as a shortcut in xfce, the first call will start it and recurring calls will show the running instance.
I used terminator until a couple of weeks ago when I moved from i3 to hyprland. Now I use kitty 🤷🏼♂️
I’ve used GNOME Terminal since 2005.
I think gnome-console is the new default. At first, I was sceptical and stayed on gnome-terminal, but now gnome-console seems stable, fast and simple to replace it for me.
I have used other terminal emulators with different DEs, though.
