So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
I use Gnome Terminal and Mate Terminal on my laptop. Nothing fancy, they just work. They do what I need (which is run a shell), they support tabs, and transparency is just nice to have. I also run Tilda because once in a while I need to enter a quick command without changing desktops.
I’ve been really happy with Kitty.
Konsole is goated, legit really good.
Second to it would be Kitty in my opinion
I like Prompt.
I use Silverblue and a lot of Distrobox containers, which is why I enjoy it that much.
I discovered it through Bazzite.Before that, I used Gnome Console or Black Box, because they’re based on Libadwaita, good looking and very simple, which is enough for my needs.
Call me boring, but I really like the Gnome terminal.
There was one terminal that blew my mind in terms of speed and features, and it was Kitty: it’s properly fast and it’s packed with fantastic features, such as the ability to display images and play videos in the terminal itself.
However, I uninstalled it because it did one thing that really, REALLY rubbed me the wrong way: by default, it phones home to find updates.
Any software that phones home behind my back, even with good intentions, and particularly something as essential as a terminal in which you type all sorts of passwords, gets a hard pass from me. But if you don’t mind, I highly recommend it.
by default, it phones home to find updates.
Do you have a source for that? I just did a rough check using nethogs (on my Arch box) and I didn’t see any connections originating from kitty.
I also found this comment from the author mentioning that he wasn’t a fan of automatic updates (which implied it wasn’t a feature).
and no I dont want to do automatic updates, am not a fan of those. If and when you have an issue or want to try new functionality, its just a simple command to update it.
Do you have a source for that?
Yeah, my own eyes: it told me an update was available. That alarmed me enough to look around, and I found a toggle in the config file to disable automatic update checking. It was on by default.
Then I promptly uninstalled it. Too bad, because I really liked it.
EDIT: maybe I wasn’t clear: it doesn’t auto-update, it checks for updates. Slight difference. What bothers me with that is that it does networking operations when a terminal has no business doing any networking at all.
Hmm, sounds like you used a binary build that wasn’t packaged by your distro, which explains why I didn’t see any network traffic from my Kitty which I installed from the Arch repos. The config docs mentions this:
update_check_intervalThe interval to periodically check if an update to kitty is available (in hours). If an update is found, a system notification is displayed informing you of the available update. The default is to check every 24 hours, set to zero to disable. Update checking is only done by the official binary builds. Distro packages or source builds do not do update checking.
Ah right. Well it’s possible, I don’t really remember. That was quite some time ago.
Kitty, hands down. GPU accelerated; native image protocol implemented by
ranger,neofetch, and more; incredibly customizable; multiplexing with multiple windows and tabs; ligature support; and much moreIf anybody has any questions about it, swing on over to Kitty Terminal Emulator [!kittyterimal@midwest.social]
I have to ssh in to arbitrary systems often and Kitty seemed to have compatibility issues, which I still don’t grok but plainly can’t use
kitty requires its
terminfobe set properly on the remote host. Its best to use the ssh kitten (I have it aliased), though it’s only technically required the first time on any particular box/instance. See this issue in the FAQ: I get errors about the terminal being unknown or opening the terminal failing or functional keys like arrow keys don’t work?
Konsole is excellent. Wezterm is even better, and can pretty much do everything, everywhere.
There’s no need to bother with the others if you like either of these.
I just switched to wezterm and I’m really liking it so far. Takes some time to setup and tweak, but you can do almost anything. Works “everywhere“ too.
The only thing I’m missing so far is broadcast input.
I use Tilix, mostly because I’m used to it. I should probably upgrade to the plethora of new GTK4 terminal emulators, but I just can’t be bothered. Plus none of them support tiling.
Tillix is the way.
I am a boring person and use what my DE gives me by default. Konsole is very good and I also use Yakuake a lot but I will also take a closer look at Kitty.
I’m sort of in the same position I guess. I’m interested in other options, but so far Konsole has more than satisfied my needs. It does everything I need and is easy to customize.
Oh, I’m missing out on the latest “xyz dev is a jerk” drama again? Oh well …
I use Kitty, it’s a great terminal emulator that is easily extendable and gives me all the features I like.
I’ve been using Terminator for years primarily because it’s portable. It predates a lot of the portable terminals in vogue right now. I haven’t really noticed a difference in using any of the newer ones so I haven’t switched. There’s some endowment effect there and sunk cost dotfiles.
If there’s a good comparison someone knows about that I should scope to understand what I’m missing I’m always curious!
I also exclusively use terminator, I just wish it had ligatures
Konsole and Kitty are objectively better than alacrity. So it’s a question of which of those to use. Konsole if you use the Breeze application style, and Kitty if you don’t. Konsole has the best keybinds and it actually has a scrollbar, but kitty doesn’t require breeze.
Konsole doesn’t require Breeze. It’s themable, like most KDE applications. It does ship with a Breeze terminal color scheme, but that’s just the default. Many more are available out of the box and creating new ones is easy.
If you can’t give evidence, it’s not nice to spread rumours
