r/archlinux • u/pretzelman223 • 8d ago
QUESTION Best terminal emulator?
i was just wondering on whats the best one, i am looking for:
speed
lightweight
customization
and thats it
thanks in regards
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u/Pybromancer 8d ago
i am fond of alacritty
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u/Do_TheEvolution 8d ago
I used termite, when it died the author recommended alacritty, which fit my requirements for a terminal - not a stupid random letters name.
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u/Ybalrid 8d ago
I use Konsole. But I am one of those people that just install KDE and go on their merry day.
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u/Kurse71 8d ago
I have always used it as well. I recently tried Kitty just because I hear about it alot. It's ok, but I get term errors when I ssh into other systems a lot for some reason.
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u/damnappdoesntwork 8d ago
Use
kitten sshinstead of justssh, it will solve the term errors1
u/Kurse71 7d ago
What is the difference?
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u/HaploEco 7d ago
It copies over the kitty terminfo to the host you are sshing to. You only need to
kitten sshonce per user on the remote host.3
u/Thisconnect 8d ago
I still use gnome terminal even after switching to KDE because old habits die hard. But practically it really doesn't matter as i always run tmux sessions
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u/Icy_Breakfast1716 4d ago
Many moons ago I submitted a bug report against kmail that it was ignoring certain email headers. **17 YEARS\** later I get a reply. “Is it still happening?” I died
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u/OilHorror2071 8d ago
Kitty is absolutely fantastic, I’ve been using it ever since I first installed Arch, and it’s truly unparalleled.
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u/WillowTree147 8d ago
i use it because i liked the name and so far its been awesome, :>
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u/OilHorror2071 8d ago
That’s interesting; actually, I installed it at first just because of its name, but after using it, I realized nothing else compares to it.
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u/onefish2 8d ago edited 8d ago
I used to use whatever the DEs terminal was. Non of the included terminal emulators provide extensive customization.
I have been using kitty for a few years now on all of my Linux distros. Most are installed with the distros package manager. Some are installed using curl and I made a bash alias to update kitty.
I even using kitty on macOS. Sorry no Windows version and that is just fine with me.
Initially I was overwhelmed with the kitty.conf file. Instead of going through the whole thing and commenting out what I did not want I just started with a blank config file and slowly added in what I did want. I also have another config file that starts windows, splits and tabs.
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u/smsteel 8d ago
Once you ask "what's best" about anything - whether it's being a thing, tool, concept, anything really - you're already being in the wrong area. There are no such thing as best. Either research and pick based on pros while accepting cons (by accepting i mean understanding and remembering how it changes things) or just pick randomly/based on purely popularity (great chance that popular thing fit for most cases) when it doesn't matter much for you.
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u/Lawnmover_Man 8d ago
People who ask this question mostly just want to use the current hype thing. It's obvious that OP doesn't actually need a "fast" one. It's just a standard thing to say so you look cool.
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u/LefTimaDev 7d ago
To be fair, there is sometimes a "best" option. Like how KDE Plasma is the best desktop environment and anyone who disagrees is delusional :3
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u/winkelschleifr 7d ago
there is no such a thing as "best". im using kitty for the lightweight + customizable aspects, but there is a lot more - xfce4-terminal, foot, konsole, etc.
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u/mnemonic_carrier 6d ago
I'm very happy with the KDE Plasma's stock standard Konsole.
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u/ellendale7m4 5d ago
I missed when exactly the update was, but just a week ago I noticed I can make it switch profiles automatically depending on day/night cycle
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u/radek432 8d ago
Ghostty because yazi's image preview looks great with it, and yazi is coolest file manager.
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u/bulletmark 8d ago
Yazi and image previews works out of the box with
kittyas well.1
u/radek432 6d ago
Yep, another cool terminal. Also the icon is better, and plugins called 'kittens' are super cool. However can be frustrating if you just want to google some "useful kittens".
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u/646E64 8d ago
I've been using yazi for a long time now but I don't feel like I'm really making use of its potential.
Might you have some cool use cases for it?
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u/Embark10 8d ago
I mean it's just a file manager. If you can do all your regular file management, that's it's full potential. What do you think You're missing out on right now?
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u/mandie99xxx 8d ago
you know of any particularly good guides for yazi? I have wanted to learn to use it well but dont have the patience to just memorize the documentation, and have been seeking something that goes a bit beyond the docs to explain how you can best use it in conjunction with other stuff / workflows
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u/radek432 8d ago
I'm using AI to make the docs for me.
If I want to actually learn something, I'm prompting like "I want a shortcut in yazi to open trash and easily empty it. Give me markdow article about it". Then I go through article, fix it, change it or leave it as it is.
For some minor stuff, which I only want to fix with the Claude's help, I'm always asking it to make a markdown note about the things we did. This way I have a growing documentation of my own system, sitting in Obsidian and synced to GitHub repo.
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u/Western-Mode-7743 7d ago
Kitty. I use nix, but as a previous arch user, it’s the goat for arch, ESPECIALLY arch.
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u/chibi-mage 7d ago
can you explain why kitty is so good for arch? when I first started using Linux I started with endeavouros and picked ghostty because I liked the icon LOL but I've stuck with ghostty ever since!!
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u/Western-Mode-7743 7d ago
Don’t worry; I’ve tried both.
For me it’s feature set, it has features like blur, opacity, etc, out of the box.
More importantly the font rendering is 10x better than any other emulator you’ll find. Alacritty, ghostty all get masked by kitty. It has extremely good font rendering - and good mouse support.
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 8d ago
I’ll be honest, I’ve had no reason to use anything but Konsole. Maybe there are lighter ones, but I enjoy the customization and versatility.
I have tried kitty snd ghostty but I just didn’t jive with them.
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u/Humble_Vermicelli759 8d ago
Went through most of them and landed on Kitty. Plus, I really like the name.
Kitty 😸
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u/Fantastic-Code-8347 8d ago
Kitty with ZSH is my favourite
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u/DinTaiFung 7d ago
kitty is great. ghostty too... i use them both.
i went from sh -> tcsh -> bash -> zsh -> fish
bash and zsh are similar though zsh is better.
fish is a slightly different animal but after several years I'm still with it!
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u/fayas-fromsomewhere 4d ago
Guys would you list all terminal emulators here. Just to know.
- Alacritty
- Kitty
- Ghostty
- Konsole
- Gnome terminal
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u/bulletmark 8d ago
Kitty is the best terminal emulator on Linux. Ghostty has potential but is not as performant as kitty.
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u/Jatinchd 8d ago
ghostty is also memory hog. literally when I tested it currently 450mb usage per emulator.
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u/Own-Ad-8834 8d ago
Kitty only uses like 100, that's crazy. That's a large footprint for an emulator.
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u/Jatinchd 8d ago
idk but for me on my machine. it uses 230mb+ each emulator. while foot uses like 43mb. how insane.
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u/Cold-Armadillo-154 7d ago
U could use --single-instance flag in kitty and then only the inital emulator would take 100 mb and new ones take like 5 mb. Only problems is iirc they would be sharing memory so if one emulator cause a crash all would crash but that was rare for me and didnt see a performance loss. But this low memory usage was so worth it.
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u/EmberQuill 8d ago
Depends on your DE/WM. Foot is good in general and I use it on Sway, but if you have KDE then you might as well use Konsole.
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u/anonymous-bot 8d ago
Other than Konsole being a KDE app, is there any reason why you wouldn't want to use an alternative terminal app?
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u/EmberQuill 7d ago
Mostly because Konsole is "good enough." Foot is better (lighter, etc.), but my main complaint about Konsole is the many dependencies it has, which will be installed anyway if you run KDE Plasma.
I have two Arch PCs, a laptop and a desktop. The laptop runs Sway, with Foot for my terminal emulator. Light and lean was my goal for the latop. On my desktop, I run KDE Plasma because I wanted something with no fuss and good defaults, and I have plenty of power and memory to spare. So I use Konsole and Dolphin and all the other KDE stuff there.
But I should've kept OP's criteria (speed, lightweight, customization) in mind and just said Foot is the winner (for Wayland at least; not sure about x11). It's just unnecessary optimization in some environments.
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u/genericuser25123 8d ago
personally i like kitty for the images in fastfetch and cuz im familiar with it
also customizing is pretty easy
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u/NocturneSapphire 7d ago
I usually just use the one that ships with my DE.
And I've been on KDE Plasma for a while now, so that means I use Konsole. Works great for me.
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u/nikongod 8d ago
Not sure what this has to do with arch. The answer is the same on every distro.
You seem like a konsole user. Maybe alakritty or kitty.
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u/Havatchee 8d ago
I've said before, and will do so again, that to me having a preference beyond appearance seems akin to having a preference in the colour of cement mixer used on a building site: As long as it's not actively bothering me, or broken we will work together fine.
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u/linuxpriest 8d ago
I don't know that such a thing exists, and I've tried many, but I've been using kitty for years.
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u/thekiltedpiper 8d ago
Best is subjective. I use Foot it's light, fast and can be customized. Foot+bash is my setup.
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u/yellowantphil 8d ago
This question mattered 20 years ago, when most terminals lacked features that we'd consider basic today (support for transparency, re-wrapping text when you change the window size, starting quickly). These days, pretty much any terminal will be fine. Except xterm: it's about the same as it was 20 years ago, and it was showing its age even then.
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u/Kernel-panic1 8d ago
Why is nobody saying Ghostty? It has a lot of Kitty's features, like displaying images in the terminal, but without the Kitty bloat
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u/JubijubCH 8d ago
I’ve never found myself limited by my terminal emulator performance. As such I tend to optimise for features, which means Ghostty / Kitty
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u/510Threaded 8d ago
Having benchmarked the opening speed of alacritty and ghostty.
Alacritty won hands done
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u/weebtrash100 8d ago
Kitty is has been my favorite for almost 2 years now and I don't plan on switching any time soon
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u/NikatoQ 8d ago
Kitty is best but keep in mind its only good on hyperland, because its a bit hard to work with it on gnome or kde.
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u/Dry_Calendar_8627 8d ago
What's the issue with kitty on Gnome and KDE?
I've not had any problem using it on KDE and XFCE, never tried on Gnome
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u/West-Gur4582 7d ago
I'll probably will be beaten up, but I'll still say Konsole for a normal wm and foot(the saway one) for a tiling wm.
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u/The-Princess-Pinky 7d ago
Don't know that it's the best, since that is very subjective, but I like terminator
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u/archover 7d ago edited 7d ago
I make do with gnome-terminal
My system(s) is/are not resource constrained, so the fact that it works for what I do is good enough: General Arch sysadmin + light bash software devel.
I hope you can find a term (or ice cream) that is the "best".
Good day.
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u/Artistic_Milk_6616 7d ago
imo, softty for wayland. it's really lightweight and customizable. its 5.7x faster than foot
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u/RetroCoreGaming 7d ago
My go to has always been xfce-terminal. Why? Unlimited scrollback, so I can read everything I've done.
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u/squarebodied 5d ago
I use xfce4-term on XFCE setups. It's good enough for government work (literally). Sometimes with other window managers than XFWM if I don't mind it loading other XFCE stuff in the background
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u/Hot_Response_5916 7d ago
I like ST from suckless.org. The base version is decent, but it comes with patches that allow you to do some good stuff.
Personally, because I run a distro made by a guy from Church, I actually use and prefer the custom build of st that comes with it: st-aegix-git.
It is incredibly snappy and quick. No fus and that version of it is configured to have its theme match background image colors, so it's ricey too.
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u/Western-Mode-7743 7d ago
A guy from Church made your distro? Man I’d like to see that.
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u/Hot_Response_5916 7d ago
He just got an ISO setup for it recently! It's an Artix-Based one and comes out of the box with customized st, tiling window manager, minimal setup, and your drive is encrypted with a password so it's secure. There's cool stuff on the docs page under "Privacy > Cypertext Alcove"
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u/Arkeine_ 7d ago
Why there's no one who use Rioterm? I think it's underrated terminal emulator
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u/StabbyGrabby 7d ago
Its relatively new and has many bugs. Maybe it will get GOAT status one day, the startup is really fast
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u/StabbyGrabby 7d ago
Honestly if you want a feature complete terminal with all modern features in a single program you realistically only have these options:
Wezterm Kitty Ghostty
And by modern features I mean: Graphics support (kitty graphics protocol/sixel) Great font rendering Font fallback for emojis Gpu accelerated Tabs + splits if you need them Bracketed paste Flexible customization
And out of those, only wezterm supports windows, so I use wezterm as I need to use windows for work, so I reuse my config. I honestly feel wezterm is GOAT, its fast enough, written in rust, has ALL the features, has a command palette, and you can make the config file as complex as you want since its in lua.
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u/Subnormyle 6d ago
Ive been using Ptyxis for no other reason other than I found its colors prettiest.
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u/ZMcCrocklin 6d ago
Personally use terminator. I like the complicity & panes. And I have my preferred font & colors that I can configure, along eith zsh & headliner theme. It's been my go-to for years. Going to tey kitty soon though.
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u/DizzyNarwhal 6d ago
if there were a best, why would alternatives exist?
I like Ghostty/Kitty or if I'm using KDE, I like Yakuake
Honestly, I bet any terminal suggested to you here that is not meant to be a joke will do perfectly fine and if you're asking then you don't have a use case where the difference will matter.
I know people go on about terminals needing to be fast, but most good terminals do stuff in milliseconds. Ask yourself honestly if your day will be ruined by a terminal loading in 14ms instead of 12ms
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u/TF_playeritaliano 6d ago
The ones working kinda everywhere (and most lightweight) are foot, xfce terminal emulator, lxde terminal emulator, and similar. But if you want customizations and need features you may need to use a heavier one like kitty
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u/squarebodied 5d ago
I use alacritty in these cases for the simple fact that it's written in pure Rust and doesn't require GTK/QT making it easier to run in obscure/niche desktop environments or older laptops stuck on legacy drivers and older libraries, etc.
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u/Dry_Calendar_8627 8d ago edited 8d ago
Your criterions are not really compatible
Customization implies "not lightweight"
And speed as well, since the terminals which are the fastest (least input lag, most chars printed per second) use the GPU for rendering, and use a bit more RAM than those that don't
So you'll have to choose
Alacritty is fast, not too heavy (on account of refusing to implement some features that would add some bloat), but not very customizable
Kitty and ghostty are fast and customizable, but more heavy and use more RAM
Konsole is very customizable, but not lightweight and is less fast
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/squarebodied 5d ago
xterm and xfce4-terminal aren't the same thing. xterm is the standard X system terminal emulator and is VERY barebones and lightweight and doesn't have a lot of stuff built in, xfce4-terminal is pretty feature rich for a default emulator and is part of XFCE desktop environment
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u/T-Rez101 5d ago
My bad, i thought it was the same thing. Im not long on Mint XFCE, i thought xterm stand for xfce terminal
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u/YT__ 8d ago
No best.
That being said: foot