this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I'm curious what the good options are for terminals. I've skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they're too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I'm just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I'm aware that there's not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I'm curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Personally I've just been using konsole since it's what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I'm missing out on features I don't even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i'm doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don't know about.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Ghostty 👻

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I love foot. The only caveat is that it's only for Wayland (no X support).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

I'm using st with tmux. It's in written in c, simple configuration can be done by editing the header file(s). More complex customization (such as visual bell or transparency) can be done via patch files.

Not the most beginner friendly terminal but super light weight and fast.

I was tinkering with ollama+deepseek and trying to integrate it into my bash functions, but gave up, because i could not supress that stupid prompt. Found it easyer to just have a browser window open (switching windows can become muscle memory in tiling wms like i3/sway or dwm).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

I concur it just works good choice

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago

You don't really need anything fancy, but... I use Kitty because why not make things pretty

[–] [email protected] 16 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you're a serious terminal user.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such

I think that's a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don't understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Fair, I'm definitely not a 'serious' terminal user.

Yeah I was wondering about that, it'd be nice to have an LLM that's specifically trained on like linux system configs and shit, but that's well beyond the scope of my capabilities, so if it doesn't already exist I'm just SOL on that one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Yeah I mean even if it was trained specifically for that, they often will still be incorrect because they don't actually understand the concepts they're presenting.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 16 hours ago

Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Are you serious? It's just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I'm mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don't need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can't imagine what other features may I need.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

What do you want to accelerate? And for what you need more than 256 colors?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

If you're on a high-refresh display, the GPU acceleration allows for much faster updates. Makes it feel much smoother. It's of course not needed, but neither is a lot of stuff we do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah I have been, I've just seen discussion about terminals that do all kinds of fancy shit and I'm wondering if I'm missing out on features by using the default (konsole), though it seems fairly full-featured. shrug

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.

The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago

Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.

Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I'd install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I'll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

My suggestion is you focus more on learning to use the terminal than figuring out which one to use. Switching terminals is like a micro version of distro hopping without the benefits.

I use ollama for llms, but being a terminal tool, you need to be comfortable using the terminal.

To answer your original question, I use alacritty. Minimal bells and whistles. Just a terminal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Uhh, switching terminals is nothing like distro-hopping, that's a ridiculous analogy. You might need to configure the new terminal, but that's it, and there's no cost or conflict.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Fair, although I am reasonably comfortable with the terminal (just don't know all the commands and such, always having to look that sort of thing up). I used to run linux installs many years ago back when stuff like slackware and redhat were the standard distros and X was iffy at best so I've done a lot of that sort of thing, just not in like 20+ years.

But I'm seeing lots of recommendations for alacritty, I'll check it out, though most people seem to think konsole is fine unless I have specific needs which I really don't. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

kitty. The ssh kitten is enough reason to use it. I work ob a lot of different systems that require OTP. Using the ssh kitten I can type the OTP once and can spawn new terminals that ssh and cd to the remote direvtory without logging in again. Obviosly the tabs and window panes are are a must too. There's tons of other useful features that I like, like using hints to select nunbers, filenames, urls, etc in the terminal output.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 minutes ago

And most importantly, you can play arround with pretty kittens 😁

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.

OP, to be frank, descriptions like "general terminal stuff" and "nothing terribly fancy" are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you're (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.

what do you folks use

Ptyxis

and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Sorry, by 'general terminal stuff' and 'nothing fancy' I mean I just like edit config files, run system commands, that sort of thing. But yeah I'm not like doing complex data management or programming or whatever.

I'll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

No worries, fam! And thank you for clarifying! Based on your answer, I'll assume that Konsole should suit you more than well for the time being. The moment you're starting to 'live' inside a terminal is when looking elsewhere for something more advanced and/or powerful starts to make a lot more sense.

I’ll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!

Aight. Glad to hear that you're interested! Have a good one, fam 😉.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Konsole, because it fits in nicely with Plasma (as you would expect) and does everything I need a terminal to do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

I'm fond of guake. Single button shortcut, dropdown terminal inspired by the Quake console. I'm just a guy who ditched windows, by no means a power user.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I use xfce4-terminal, lxterminal is also good for the same reasons. The nice thing about them is that their configs are very stable (this can be a bit of an issue with KDE, e.g. I recently had to redo my editor themes for Kate because the old ones weren't compatible anymore), and they save system resources by letting all terminals run in one process. Running terminal windows in separate processes might protect you from crashes, but even though I use terminals heavily I just never have terminal crashes. And they're simpler to configure than e.g. urxvt.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Alacritty, one of the first rust based terminals. Fast, simple config. Had no problems. Foot as a second if you want an alternative.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

I typically use both alacrity and kitty depending on what I'm trying to do

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

i just use xterm. it has proper unicode support now and is very lightweight. or maybe urxvt if i need more features.

on termux where xterm doesn't run i use st instead, it needs some source patching (very barebones) but it works pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

I like minimal terminals, was using st for a long time and now I'm using foot for quite a while already. Since I'm using tmux I don't need my terminal to have any tab/windowing features

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I like guake, or yakuake.. they are inspired by the console in Quake. F9 drops it down and hides it. Works for what i need it to. I'm just a guy who recently ditched windows, not a power user.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

My terminal of choice nowadays is Alacritty. It's nice and clean, has a text based config file and decent feature support. The only annoyance is the lack of tabs, but I spend most of my terminal time ssh'd into a tmux session on a remote server anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don't need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn't have this really handy theme switching feature.

That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn't as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.