Alacritty, Konsole, or something else? Which terminal emulator do you recommend?

flubba86, 3 months ago

I was a fan of Alacritty and used it for the last 3 years, but I was frustrated by the lack of features (no scroll bar, no native tabs) and the disrespectful way the developers handled feature requests.

A few weeks ago someone on this site recommended Wezterm, so I tried it out, and it’s amazing. It’s everything I was hoping Alacritty would be or could become.

Read this thread for more details, specifically the reply by wez: github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/1769

Shareni, 3 months ago

I was a fan of Alacritty and used it for the last 3 years, but I was frustrated by the lack of features

You were a fan, but didn’t realise that it’s minimal on purpose?

It’s AFAIK the only popular, minimal, GPU accelerated terminal emulator. It doesn’t have tabs, multiplexing, and other features because it’s not supposed to. Your wm/tmux handles that already, and scrollbars are waste of screen space.

Would you also complain that a flat head screwdriver is missing those cross bits to help you unscrew phillips heads?

GolfNovemberUniform, 3 months ago

Kitty but only if you don’t mind configuring everything in a config file. It has GPU acceleration so it will be faster than Konsole when showing 300+ lines of output on older hardware. Alacritty had a lot of issues on my installations so can’t recommend it

codr9, 3 months ago

I’m just curious, when do I have to care about virtual terminal speed? When do you need that GPU acceleration?

GolfNovemberUniform, 3 months ago

From my experience, you only really need it when you want to get a lot of output (try find /). In my cases it’s more than 2 times faster on GPU accelerated terminal emulators. And I believe you can’t display images on non-accelerated ones

Shareni, 3 months ago

Just tried “time tree ~” and “time fd .mkv /” in alacrity and konsole. Konsole was actually beating it by fractions of a second in most runs. Alacritty was only slightly faster at treeing after a few runs.

GolfNovemberUniform, 3 months ago

It’s always faster after a few runs. But in my case it’s like 10 seconds faster. Though I have an old HDD so maybe that’s the reason lol

56_, 3 months ago

Konsole can display sixel images (same as kitty I believe), though I don’t know anything about it’s implementation.

clemdemort, 3 months ago

I can’t recommend kitty enough it’s really great!

danielfgom, 3 months ago

Tilix

sleepyTonia, 3 months ago

For me that’s the one, even though I’ve also been using KDE plasma for the better part of the past ten years. Very configurable, going as far as to have an option to disable CSD. It also looks like a proper modern app without being dumbed down.

iiGxC, 3 months ago

Would be foot but monaspace font doesn’t work that well, so kitty

outerspace, 3 months ago

Kitty

pingveno, 3 months ago

I just never would recommend mixing Gnome’s Terminal and Konsole. Gnome and KDE never seem to play nice with each other. Besides that, go wild.

LiamMayfair, 3 months ago

Kitty. Don’t really care about the dev. I don’t use software or not just because the devs are assholes, as long as they’re not cannibals or pedos ofc. Even less so if it’s FOSS.

drwho, 3 months ago

I use Gnome Terminal and Mate Terminal on my laptop. Nothing fancy, they just work. They do what I need (which is run a shell), they support tabs, and transparency is just nice to have. I also run Tilda because once in a while I need to enter a quick command without changing desktops.

const_void, 3 months ago

KDE user so I use Konsole. It’s great.

jennraeross, 3 months ago

Honestly, Konsole is fantastic. On Gnome I use Blackbox, on Sway I use Foot, but if you’re on KDE you don’t really get better than Konsole.

Alacritty and Kitty are both terminals I used to use back when I was on i3wm, they’re perfectly usable, but I don’t think the average user will gain any tangible benefit from replacing Konsole.

pH3ra, 3 months ago

It all depends by what you need it for.
I remember the first years I approached Linux I wanted to try every bit of software and that made me waste a lot of time and energy because I hadn’t already learned to ask myself that question.
If you just need a terminal to run updates and basic commands, stick with what your distro is shipped with. It will be better integrated and well tested and will save you a lot of time.
If you need something in specific instead, you’ll be able to find the software with a feature set that will match all your needs.

governorkeagan, 3 months ago

I’ve been really happy with Kitty.

ScottE, 3 months ago

urxvt is the only terminal I’ll use. Every time I try something else I come back to it because of some basic thing that’s not right - usually font rendering which urxvt is one of the few that works well with scalable fonts. It’s fast and simple and does everything I need without any bloated stuff I’ll never use.

Bankenstein, 3 months ago

I’ve used GNOME’s terminal, Konsole, kitty, st, cool-retro-term, Alacritty, foot, and Wezterm.

The things I want from a terminal emulator are:

• Ligatures
• Customisability
• Icon support / good font management
• High-ish performance

Wezterm is afaik the only one with all of those.

Konsole is actually a pretty good terminal emulator, its big downside is that it looks horribly out-of-place in anything other than Plasma. So as long as you stay on Plasma, Konsole is a good choice. If you ever move to a WM or something, I recommend foot or Wezterm.

Alacritty has some degree of customisability, Konsole has more, but either way it’s nothing when compared to Wezterm. It is really fast though!

The thing that skews the duel in favour of Konsole for me is the ligature support. I use neovim for programming and we all know code ligatures are a godsend, so ligature support in the terminal is very much a thing that I want.