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?
I have never heard of terminator.
I have switched from XTerm to Konsole only a year ago.
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’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.
I’d like to think there’s a difference between “keeping up with the times” and chasing whatever new thing gets advertised.
Unless you’re really into number chasing with benchmarks then just keep using whatever you like until something YOU find better comes along.
Also I’m GenZ and just use whatever comes with the DE, it’s not an old person thing shakes fist.
I must be older and even more out of touch than you are, as I only use the default Terminal that came with my distro and I had to do a search to check what were Ghostty and Terminator (I know about the movie, obviously, but I’m also old enough to have been watching it in theatre the year it was first released ;)
I’m like a generation younger than you at least and I’m on the default terminal and tmux train, so I’m saying you’re not out of touch.
I use foot which is Wayland aware and renders Unicode fonts. Honestly I don’t need much from the terminal itself as I’m usually in tmux to deal with all the “tabs” and scrollback.
Yeah. Pretty much all of the above.
I used to rely on Sway for terminal tabs and splits. Only recently did I realize that tmux is the better option, even for local use. Already used tmux for SSH sessions.
for terminal tabs and splits. Only recently did I realize that tmux is the better option, even for local use
Reasoning?
- Muscle memory. I already did development on remote machines in nvim.
- If I start tmux in the root of a project, then every new pane or window I open automatically starts in that directory. So no need to
cdto the root for every new shell session I start.
Interesting, thanks. Had not considered that second point.
I used terminator until a couple of weeks ago when I moved from i3 to hyprland. Now I use kitty 🤷🏼♂️
I just use konsole. It comes with plasma and is more than good enough for me.
Ditto, this and Yakuake, which is great at keeping it out of the way until I need it.
Yes, Team Konsole!
Yup, Konsole is good enough.
Konsole is great! Only complaint I have is its too complicated to change the text color scheme. But I’ll manage. Still beats everything else I’ve tried.
Same, it just works.
A terminal is a terminal. If there is a feature you don’t know you need then you don’t need it. Run with whatever you have
If there is a feature you don’t know you need then you don’t need it.
That makes no sense. By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don’t -need- cars. There are of course thing “you don’t know about” but would totally use if you were introduced to them.
By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don’t -need- cars.
Most of us would be using our feet and transit (and possibly bikes); both our households and our economies would be better off financially and bodily if car use was restricted to goods hauling and some few other uses (not to mention the environment). Mass motorism has turned out to be mostly a way to enrich the auto industry, not our societies, with North America as a warning to the rest of us. (See [email protected] for more.)
There are plenty of times where humanity has chased the latest fad without considering the costs & benefits properly. The amount of energy and hardware being blown away on LLMs are another example; same goes for creepto and NFTs.
That said, having a look around for various applications, including terminals, is generally good. If someone finds something that covers their needs but with lower costs, that’s good. And if they find something with a shiny new bell or whistle at exorbitant cost, eh, maybe think twice before choosing it.
I’m pretty sure someone thought
Man it would be nice if horses were faster
I’d say the same is true for terminal emulators.
It would be neat if I could use tabs
Or
I wish there were better ways to render things to the terminal
At the end of the day it’s a black box where you can type commands. If thats all you need than you need anything else.
Agreed. I feel like this is a prime case for the Fisherman’s Parable.
The main advantages I have felt with fancy terminals are
- GPU accelerated means scrolling feels smoother
- Nice single configuration file for the terminal which I can easily move around
- Launches slightly faster. Only noticeable when you are launching multiple terminals
Launches faster sounds like you have a weird shell config.
Also scrolling isn’t really existing in a terminal. If you are
tail -f somefilethen it depends on how fast it is written to, how fast tail is. If you have some TUI tool open it dependa how fast it can emit it’s UI.If your program only emits 100MB data each seconds then a terminal sink of 30GB/s wouldn’t really benefit.
Power users like me run a terminal multiplexer anyways so there is another bottleneck.
And the configuration is onetime only (if the terminal will be downward compatible in 10 years).
On my Mac, I use Retroterm because emulates Old CRT screens - with scan lines and ghosting and stuff .
Does nothing , crashes sometimes, but is Lots of fun if you’re the guy that remembers floppies.
theres a cool preset called “futuristic” on the linux version (cool retro term) -with a bit of tweaking you can make it look like a terminal from the alien franchise
Ooh didn’t know that…
(rushes off to try it)
Terminator isn’t supported anymore as far as I remember. A good substitution for it is Tilix. I’d been using the latter for a while but recently I switched to the new default terminal in Fedora (it had weird name that I unable to remember) and Tilling Shell extension for Gnome.
Tilix is great but also unmaintained.
Terminal emulators are pretty niche. I also tend to stick with what’s included with the DE. I’ve only used a third party terminal when I used gnome. Blackbox, as the one included in gnome at the time was still using gtk3.
Terminal emulators are pretty niche.
Lol
Imagine being this guy above me and thinking that the percent of people that would switch out from their default shipped DE terminal emulator is anything but a minority 🤪
I mean, you work with what’s there. But the world works (not runs, that’s the shell) on them.
Nah, the world uses what’s there. It’s a small subset that even works on them directly. See also: xkcd meme about infra being supported by one guy in some random state.
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.
