Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=793948

by code_devil • 17 years ago

33 83 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I use putty and have played with secureCRT. What are the other terminals people in HN use on a daily basis.

jsares• 17 years ago

I've used both on Windows before and also use Cygwin.

pwmanagerdied2• 17 years ago

Could someone explain the interest/value of this post to me? I'm not familiar with anything that would significantly distinguish them.

pyre7• 17 years ago

* Unicode support

* Transparency/Pseudo-transparency support

* Interactions with other systems and their termcap/terminfo files.

* Interaction with GNU screen (iirc, the 'auto-detect' feature of XFCE4-Terminal for which backspace sequence to send fails for me currently when using screen. I have to force it to use ^H as backspace)

* Support for more than just Type-1 fonts.

* How does the scrollback buffer work? gnome-terminal SUCKS when a wall of text hits the screen, while rxvt-unicode blows through it like nothing.

... There are many other things that could be brought up in relation to these (terminal emulators). For instance, rxvt-unicode has a powerful Perl API, and there are many modules that do things like (for instance) implement simple tabs for a rxvt-unicode window.

pwmanagerdied2• 17 years ago

Jesus, I'd been using gnome-terminal sine I switched over to Linux full-time a few months ago. I assumed that the reason it was sluggish was because I'm running it on an old machine. I just installed rxvt-unicode after re-reading your post, and even after enabling a background image for no good reason it blows gnome-terminal away.

Thanks a lot, this is something worth knowing.

Sapient• 17 years ago

I managed to get quite a few excellent tips out of this discussion. I found a far less buggy terminal, and discovered a feature of Windows I didnt know existed.

Seems like a good deal to me...

mhansen2• 17 years ago

Putty, with a cygwin patch. Works fine, only gripe with it is I can't press Windows+Left and have it take up the left half of the screen. It just refuses to resize.

The windows terminal is just horrible.

I tried Console2 but it was buggy as hell, froze all the time, and the transparency made it lag.

smhinsey• 17 years ago

Wow, I had no idea about the Win-Arrow window resizing thing. Thanks for mentioning it.

makecheck3• 17 years ago

On the Mac, I use MacTelnet, even as a local terminal. It has an almost ridiculous number of features (compared to Terminal.app or iTerm, anyway), and is very configurable. The main problems are that it is mainly vt100/partial-xterm, and is a beta.

On Linux or Solaris, I use "aterm". It works as well as xterm or rxvt. But it has a lot of nice interface tweaks, such as NeXT-style scrollbars, pseudo-transparency, more intelligent text selection (IMHO), and a way to change colors when inactive.

On Windows, I don't run much locally (since not a lot of useful command-line tools come with Windows). So my terminal work tends to be over SSH to a machine that has real tools. :) I use PuTTY for SSH, and it works very well. My main issue is that it seems unnecessarily hard to do certain things, e.g. copy/paste.

apotheon6• 17 years ago

I used to use aterm, but one thing drove me to change -- Unicode support. Now, I use rxvt-unicode.

Since making the move, though, I've grown to love rxvt-unicode's daemon mode and discovered that pseudo-transparency works better than it did on aterm. I mention my reasons for choosing rxvt-unicode over other terminal emulators here:

http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=451

pyre7• 17 years ago

rxvt-unicode also supports true transparency when you have a composite manager active.

jcromartie• 17 years ago

Terminal.app as of OS X 10.5 is my favorite terminal. I like to use rxvt under Cygwin.

erlanger• 17 years ago

I'm using 2.1 on 10.6...I think it's about the same as 2.0.

ptomato2• 17 years ago

You can split windows, but otherwise pretty much the same, yes.

whalesalad• 17 years ago

I definitely feel performance increases all over the place in 10.6. Particularly in Terminal.app... it's super snappy! Directory listings are instantaneous whereas before there seemed to be a slight little lag.

Note: I am using zsh with my term declared as xterm.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

Try out iTerm sometime. Much, much faster and lighter than Terminal.app. I switched to iTerm when Terminal.app crashed while compiling Haiku ... twice. The problem, I believe, was the large amount of compiler output.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

I used iTerm before Leopard, but it crashed at least once a week, and sometimes it would just forget settings, and it used up an insane amount of resources if you left it open for a few days (and shutting down all my ssh sessions and restarting them is not my idea of a good time, nor is trying to figure out where I put this server or that server in the tab list; I like them to stay at the same position so I don't have to consciously think about that).

When Leopard came out, it had a Terminal.app that fixed essentially all my issues with the previous Terminal.app, including having tabs, etc, and it hardly uses any resources at all, and stays open without crashing for weeks at a time (in fact, I don't think I've ever managed to crash it). Now that there's a copy-on-select plugin for SIMBL for Terminal.app, it's just about perfect.

khaless• 17 years ago

I second iTerm. Its Great

blasdel2• 17 years ago

My experience is entirely the opposite of yours -- I always found iTerm to be a crashy and slow, with piles of ill-considered misfeatures.

spudlyo• 17 years ago

I recently switched back to iTerm due to its full screen option, which I use when I want to really concentrate and/or see some really wide output. Back in the Panther/Tiger days it used to crash rather frequently, seems a lot better now; I haven't had it crash in some time. I can tolerate the occasional crash because my sessions are always protected by screen.

makecheck3• 17 years ago

Terminal.app is very good in many ways, but Apple really needs to work on the configuration mechanism before I can use it regularly.

I frequently want to make tweaks to one window, and I just can't stand having to make a new set of Preferences every time a window disagrees with the established settings. Since the sets contain everything (colors, terminal attributes, long lists of key mappings, etc.) there are potentially a lot of things to redo.

Also, what's bizarre is that opening a saved file has the side effect of automatically creating a new, permanent set of Preferences. There isn't much point in having files if Terminal insists on re-storing everything as Preferences anyway.

graywh• 17 years ago

Xterm.

kbob• 17 years ago

Xterm. It's been there for me since 1988, and I'm certain it'll be there right up until the eschaton in 2038. It's installed on every X11 system and it's always compatible.

(It has antialiased fonts, too.)

DanHulton• 17 years ago

Yakuake. Man, I <3 that so much. Being able to Meta+~ and just have a terminal window right freaking there? Heaven.

Plus, I set up a few hotkeys SHIFT+LEFT/RIGHT to move between sessions. SHIFT+DOWN/UP for create/close session. Makes it very easy to do things.

ptomato2• 17 years ago

You can also do this with Terminal.app on OS X with this: http://visor.binaryage.com/

shadytrees• 17 years ago

rxvt-unicode with its Perl API [1] and rather amazing list of Perl extensions [2] on Linux OSes, puttycyg on Cygwin. (I recommend puttycyg if you've been using rxvt on Cygwin. Being able to type Unicode characters is an amazingly exhilarating experience, especially if you're lonely.)

[1] http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/src/urx...

[2] http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html

duskwuff• 17 years ago

rxvt-unicode also has some of the best (most accurate, most complete) terminal emulation out there, second only to xterm. Daemon mode is also a neat trick if you're running on a limited-memory system.

apotheon6• 17 years ago

I love the daemon (aka "client/server") operation of rxvt-unicode, and the fact that with all its capabilities it's still smaller than xterm.

barrkel3• 17 years ago

I'm giving puttycyg a whirl. It uses different key codes than xterm - xterm does not default to VT220 keyboard, but puttycyg does. And both of these are different to rxvt. This primarily affects readline, and thus the bash shell.

For example, xterm sends '\e[H' for Home by default, while puttycyg (and xterm in VT220 mode) sends '\e[1~' and rxvt sends '\e[7~'.

I can configure some overrides in .inputrc, but sooner or later these start to conflict with one another if I want to be able to switch at will. Seems easier to stick to rxvt, and know that my preferences in ~/.Xdefaults also apply on non-Windows boxes.

medgar123• 17 years ago

The following PuTTY / PuTTYcyg setting may interest you:

Terminal -> Keyboard -> Change the sequences sent by -> The Home and End keys -> "rxvt"

slig2• 17 years ago

iTerm, on tiger.

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

I used to use Terminal, but switched to iTerm for a single feature (useful labels on tabs).

slig2• 17 years ago

Same here...

sielskr• 17 years ago

Gnome Terminal because of its text smoothing (and because it adheres to a set of human interface guidelines).

antileet• 17 years ago

I used to use Gnome-terminal for the same reason, but it doesn't behave great with screen sometimes, and has some other small issues.

I'd recommend mrxvt, a superset of rxvt. It's lighter, has support for tabs, fonts, transparency, etc.

http://code.google.com/p/mrxvt/wiki/Main

glymor3• 17 years ago

Are you talking about the backspace issue? There are some old patches from ubuntu that show how to fix it (though they they don't seem to use them themselves anymore):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/vte/+bug/29787/com...

rxvt and friends gave me problems using truetype fonts. They have their own code for calculating widths which gives the wrong answer even when it's monospaced.

I wish there were more terminals. It may seem like there's a lot but they are derived from a fairly small number of roots and they inherit all of the bizarre behaviour.

glymor3• 17 years ago

For those that don't run gnome you can run vte directly, just download the source and compile the demo app.

thingie• 17 years ago

There are tons of vte based terminals. Terminal of xfce, for example, which is quite "lightweight".

brtzsnr• 17 years ago

I use 'terminator' a very nice terminal based on Gnome Terminal. If you like GT definitely you should try terminator as well.

mickt2• 17 years ago

Guake, which provides a Quake like terminal and quick and easy access to a terminal using the F12 key. Plus, it supports anti-aliased fonts and multiple tabs. http://trac.guake-terminal.org/

On my Mac at work I use Visor. http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor

ramy_d• 17 years ago

+1 for Guake.

mickt2• 17 years ago

And for some reason I can't get visor to work on Snow Leopard ... grrr.

warp• 17 years ago

I prefer Terminal.app, mostly because it uses the OS native keys for copy/paste (cmd-c, cmd-v). On windows I use putty which has keyboard paste on Shift-Insert. On linux I use gnome-terminal which has keyboard copy/paste on Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V. (I should stop using all three of these operating systems... :)

bdwalter• 17 years ago

xterm

tdziuba• 17 years ago

Terminator. Fuck yeah.

barrkel3• 17 years ago

Rxvt, normally on Cygwin. If I had more use for Unicode in practice, I'd use urxvt on non-Cygwin.

Also, when ssh into remote boxes, I often use screen, which effectively ends up being a pretty crappy terminal - major failure mode is loss of scrollback buffer, Ctrl-A ESC notwithstanding.

pyre7• 17 years ago

> Ctrl-A ESC notwithstanding.

Huh? The loss of the scrollback buffer sucks... except for that other scrollback buffer?

barrkel3• 17 years ago

Mouse wheel / Shift+PgUp is infinitely more usable for scrollback access than Ctrl-A ESC. Ctrl-A ESC is sufficiently hard to access that it might as well not be a feature - rather than scroll up to see a command's output, I re-run it piped to less.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

On Windows I use MinTTY -- it is basically perfect on that platform. It's bizarre how ridiculously terrible every other windows tty is: simple shit like text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts, etc. is universally missing.

I only discovered it due to my boss' "install everything" cygwin policy, as it's in their repo and its installer puts a link on your desktop.

PuTTY is bad enough as an SSH client, much less its crap terminal emulation. Whoever at Microsoft that keeps making the decision to ship cmd.exe again needs to be hanged in public square.

mhansen2• 17 years ago

Wonderful! Thanks for mentioning MinTTY, this handles the Win+Left resizing perfectly.

gaius• 17 years ago

CME.EXE is about backwards compatibility. New work should be done in PowerShell' which is quite clever (think Unix pipes with COM objects instead of plain text).

yangyang3• 17 years ago

That's a shell, not a terminal emulator.

cturner• 17 years ago

On putty: I'm surprised to hear all the bad vibes for putty - what's wrong with its terminal emulation? I adore putty - you can configure it so that it toggles full-screen with alt+enter and can load sessions with windows+r, 'putty -load {session name}'. It's easy to configure different colours for different profiles so it's easy to always have my production consoles in red. I haven't found such a straightforward way of getting that going in a linux desktop setting (other than using putty for linux which is unrefined). The default font isn't all that nice but I think I use terminal size 10 and that looks nice. Putty supports all the stuff you criticise - 'text selection, copy-paste, window resizing, fonts' - what's the downside? I tend to use it in gnu-screen and don't have problems with this.

On cmd: Funnily enough that cmd environment has become less powerful over the evolution of Windows. For instance, it used to be possible in win2k era to bundle a complete application as a batch file by having code stored as text and written out when it ran - through a couple of mechanisms using minor features. Those features which were subsequently removed, presumably to stop just this sort of hack. The latest versions of Windows don't have telnet as standard - I'm at a complete loss to know how I'm meant to do connectivity testing with clients who don't have it and don't have permission to install it - the telnet mechanism in Windows was bad enough as it was but now they've made things worse. I've found Windows scripting host to be very poor for doing networking. It's also very crippled.

(When I'm in OSX I use iTerm because it's the only way I've found to get a nice full-screen console under the current release of OSX)

bwhite• 17 years ago

Emulator? Oh, you must be using one of those newfangled windowing subsystems. Hm. It's a fad I tell you, just a passing fad.

(Actual answer: aterm for the transparency feature.)

apu• 17 years ago

konsole. It's so much better than the gnome-terminal (monitor for silence/activity rules!).

Actually, in recent years, it seems like gnome has gotten harder and harder to use for an expert in all aspects...I occasionally have to work on a gnome machine and it's pure hell trying to figure out how to get simple stuff to work.

Of course, perhaps this is their goal in any case: target n00bs and grandmas to increase marketshare. If so, I'm perfectly fine with that =)

guicifuentes• 17 years ago

In Konsole you can split the window a là Emacs or Vim buffers, which is pretty handy always. The special keys works, not like F1 in gnome-terminal which opens the help.

How many times do you switch between terminals because you need to copy something or whatever? That's over with Konsole

nsm• 17 years ago

konsole is great for long term work, and yakuake is better for some one time command!

sykora• 17 years ago

I used to use konsole, because it was default with KDE. After some time I made a conscious effort and switched to rxvt-unicode, or urxvt. It's a great terminal emulator, once you've got it configured, but that process can be tough. The documentation for the really cool stuff has also been a tad incomplete for me.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

I use http://www.xfce.org/projects/terminal/ because it's simple and it works.

fix3r• 17 years ago

xterm bundled with Leopard.

It supports 256 colors and is very fast. Terminal.app only for quick sessions. If only X11 fullscreen feature worked properly... (should probably try the latest build of XQuartz)

yangyang3• 17 years ago

What's next then?

What OS do you use? What Linux dist? What web browser?!

nailer3• 17 years ago

Poderosa. Tabbed terminal for Windows. Has some bugs, but much more reliable than PuttyCM (the tabbed Putty wrapper).

christefano• 17 years ago

iTerm for OS X is fantastic. I like the custom keyboard profiles, full screen mode and appearance niceties (like tab styles and being able to hide the scrollbar). An especially great feature is the multiple tab input mode. Not too long ago I ssh'd into 3 new servers for three separate clients and did essentially the same setup and security updates for about an hour. At the end, I was able to bill for 3 hours.

  http://iterm.sourceforge.net/

I also use Visor, a handy utility written by Nicholas Jitkoff (the creator of Quicksilver). It extends Apple's Terminal by giving it a heads-up display, making a terminal available in any program by simply hitting a keystroke. It doesn't work with Snow Leopard, though, and when I first upgraded I actually felt like one of my limbs was always asleep. Fortunately, there's a way to make it work:

  http://metaskills.net/2009/8/18/visor-terminal-on-snow-leopard

For one-off commands where I don't need to see any output (like killing or renicing processes), I use Quicksilver in command mode and use the "run command in shell" action. The latest version of Quicksilver works with Snow Leopard with very minor problems:

  http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list

yu• 17 years ago

Putty mostly. Dated? though TeraTerm has/had good out of the box DEC, HP, IBM terminal emulation; customer engagements.

ertug• 17 years ago

rxvt-unicode along with urxvt daemon (or urxvtd). No smoothing or transparency.

A good companion to xmonad.

iterationx• 17 years ago

eterm is kinda fun http://www.enlightenment.org/

poltergeist• 17 years ago

1. Tilda. * Buggy when you have transparency enabled and resize ( or minimize and then maximize ) the terminal. Otherwise, looks and feels great.

2. Yakuake. * No bugs that I have discovered, and looks great. Is meant for KDE, but works awesomely on GNOME as well. The only nuisance is the title bar ( which can, at present have a minimum height of 1 pixel ), and we can't make it disappear completely.

Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ?

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