Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

• tilix

  52 5,292 7.9 D

  A tiling terminal emulator for Linux using GTK+ 3

• xst

  5 531 4.6 C

  st fork that uses Xresources and some pretty good patches

  

I use xst, a fork of st. It does everything I need it to do. It's not very feature-full, but even if I had the kinds of features other terminal emulators have I wouldn't use them, so this is fine.

https://github.com/gnotclub/xst

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• wezterm

  131 13,711 9.8 Rust

  A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust

• alacritty

  352 52,639 9.3 Rust

  A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

  

I was a happy urxvt user for years, but switched to Alacritty[1] about a year or so ago. My main reasons for switching were wanting better emoji support (urxvt handles Unicode admirably, but not emoji) and wanting a better configuration language (I hate writing Xresource rules).

I don't believe it's had a 1.0 release yet, but it's been stable in my use cases, and (perceptively) performant.

[1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

• kitty

  289 21,932 9.9 Python

  Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

Kitty is an amazing terminal if you are willing to spend some time to learn and customize it. Take a look at the screencast on its website, it is super powerful and will make your coworkers and friends jealous.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

• st

  46 8 5.7 C

  build of the suckless simple terminal with patches for alpha, font2, copyurl, openclipboard, invert, appsync, xresources, scrollback, w3m, keyboard select, boxdraw (by mrdotx)

st. [1] Its simple and has everything I need, which is utf-8 support. Tabs and stuff i do via tmux.

[1] https://st.suckless.org/

• alacritty

  1 8 0.0 Rust

  A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator. (by fee1-dead)

You can also take a look at https://github.com/fee1-dead/alacritty/tree/ligatures_harfbu...

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• hyperterm

  85 42,633 9.7 TypeScript

  A terminal built on web technologies

  

Surprised to see no mention of Hyper https://hyper.is/

• tmux

  207 32,923 8.3 C

  tmux source code

  

To be more explicit, tmux is not a replacement for a terminal emulator, but rather an application that is run inside one: you can open Terminal/Kitty/whatever you prefer, then run "tmux new" [1].

[1]: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Getting-Started

• tilda

  14 1,238 4.6 C

  A Gtk based drop down terminal for Linux and Unix

I used to use Guake for a long time, then when I was looking for an alternative with less dependencies, I found Tilda (https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda), which is very similar.

Suggest a related project