So, I’m looking for a new terminal, there’s a few glitches with yakuake (not dropping down on main monitor anymore, sometimes when I paste in too much text it gets all buggy) and there’s some new features I want from it I found in tabby (basically, different themes in different tabs to help orient me faster and avoid issues)
Tabby’s shortcut to dock and hide and reappear leads it to disappearing the window, not coming back, and continuing to run several processes. Also, it’s really heavy. (electron based?)
I want something that’s light and usually disappears without remaining on my task manager (system tray is ok) , unrolls and disappears at a single keyboard shortcut, has multiple tabs, and I can choose whatever colour scheme I want per tab.
Ideally, I will have a list of colour schemes , and each tab will choose the next colour scheme to move to.
Also, generic terminal preference discussion, shoutout, etc thread.
Edit: for some reason people think I want themes, which I know all terminals I’ve used support. It’s different themes per tab
Also I don’t care if it does tiling or not. If it does it, sure , whatever, but I don’t use that feature in terminals.
I’m vaguely comfortable in the terminal. I installed a fresh version of [your favorite distro] to do some quick work on a spare PC. The default file manager wouldn’t connect to my NFS share, some weird error.
Instead of tracking down the problem, I just fired up the terminal and mounted it manually. Quicker and easier.
Stuff like that.
But I could never imagine being power user enough to prefer one terminal over another. You guys are discussing features I barely understand let alone have a preference on. I only just recently added sudo !! to my repertoire!
More power to you!
It takes time to need to do more stuff in the terminal. I’m doing some web development so I need access to the terminal to inspect a database, run the server (which needs to stay open and sometimes shows errors) a way to interact with the server ad hoc or do things to the files and whatnot there, and one more for general tasks.
Sometimes I connect to my web server though the terminal; if I end up doing this more, I want these things to be visually distinct to avoid running the wrong commands in the wrong place. This is semi common practice where people colour code things differently between live, test and other environments to avoid deleting tables from live.
As a new/casual user, I wouldn’t be concerned about not using terminal enough or whatever. It’s not an contest. You just might find yourself wanting or needing to do it more as you have more and more specific needs.
The only reason I use Yakuake is because I want to not have to launch a terminal whenever I want to do a small task, and because it builds my self esteem to have it set up where I can pop open a terminal whenever I want to. It also encourages me to use it more and improve my bash skills by using it more.
I used a few terminal apps in the past. My current one is “Konsole” from the KDE project. It is quiet feature rich, has support for tabs and color schemes. It even supports split views, where multiple “terminals” are in one window and stay together. What I also find useful is, it has a right mouseclick menu option to open current directory in my file manager.
But it does not have a builtin functionality to “hide”. For KDE there is an extension (called Kwin Scripts) to turn any terminal app you want to into a quake or yakuake like drop down: Quakified Terminal But that is for KDE only off course. Edit: I just learned this Quakified Terminal addon is quite new and got its first release version 4 hours ago as of writing. Lol. That’s a coincidence.
Yakuake is built with all the same components as and shares configuration with konsole. It’s specifically quake mode konsole
Konsole from what I recall isn’t GPU accelerated so it’s noticeably slower. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/ (metrics might be a bit outdated by now) I recommend Kitty.
Considering that whenever I am gaming, the game is using all the VRAM it can, I’d rather not have more stuff be GPU accelerated. CPU cores are mostly freely available.
Since my tasks on the terminal are pretty basic, the runtime speeds don’t matter much.
In another use case, Kitty is much faster at startup than Konsole, most probably because of plugins, shared libraries, d-bus actions, etc. but then Kitty cannot beat
stand its extra features are not particularly needed by me.So yeah, perhaps if you can get st working in your setup, that might be a nice experience. Although that one would have other problems:
- I don’t know if it has tab theming. The tab functionality itself was a patch IIRC
- It makes an X11 window, so you will have to worry about XWayland issues
There might be some project trying to get a Wayland version of a st-like terminal emulator, which might work out for you.
I don’t notice any difference regarding this topic. And I used Kitty and Alacritty before too, for months or years in combined usage. And I am someone who does a lot stuff in terminal, including programming Rust, write lots of scripts and use a terminal filemanager from time to time. Konsole is not noticeably slower than Kitty, it is measurably and marginally slower than Kitty on specific hardware and tasks, but not in my experience. I only speak for myself and my experience.
I don’t have much to contribute but I can’t believe a terminal application was written with electron.
I hate electron-based apps with a passion. They run like shit, often look like shit and their user experience can often be described as shit.
I was told by an Electron user that the Framework itself isn’t bad.
It’s probably the types of users (framework users = application devs) that it attracts that are giving it a bad name.But I won’t know much. I myself have only used QML for similar stuff.
And I have seen it to be pretty easy to make a mess out of.So yeah, the same app dev might have made a shitty web-app instead. And I had heard of some Electron app that was actually good (forgot it though). Still not going to bother with them, though.
I was told by an Electron user that the Framework itself isn’t bad.
They ate the kool-aid and are propagandizing their ponzi scheme now.
Electron is so bad by itself there’s at least one whole alternative, “Tauri” or something, that has ended up in the construction of a whole “alternatives” ecosystem.
I am not a developer, but I can definitely tell you that “native” apps tend to work a lot better when the system is under pressure (a complex video upscaling task in the background) and have better system integration and consistency.
FreeTube is a solid electron app, but they are cloning a desktop page (YT) so that makes things a lot easier on the UI/UX front. Performance and “micro-responsiveness” is bad, just like every Electron I’ve ever used.
“native” apps tend to work a lot better when the system is under pressure
Well yeah, that’s pretty much a given.
I really hope recent lack of powerful computers drives up demand and willingness to make more native apps, but I’m not expecting anything.
I like to use wezterm (https://wezterm.org/index.html) - it supports theming, tiling and the terminal image protocol. It works fine with various terminal tools.
I use alacritty with a small script that calls tdrop to make it a drop-down terminal, and sets a few other window properties. For tabs I use tmux as it’s amazing and works everywhere.
It all works perfectly on X, but tdrop is pretty glitchy on Wayland with multiple monitors. Since I use the drop-down terminal a lot, that this was enough of a trigger to move from gnome to kde where I can still use X.
To me the only terminals to consider are foot (as the backup) and wezterm/ghostty. Ghostty being the newest yet feels the most complete and polished.
there are profiles in yakuake that can include theme if you didn’t know about them. not automatic assignment to each tab but if you have a fixed set of tasks you want a tab for it’d work
tilda is worth a look.
came to comment the same. But it’s been a while since I was in tiling window land so not sure if it matches what the poster is looking for.
I’ve tried the various quake menus over the years and while I love the functionality, I dislike the instability. I’ll be honest in that I never seem to resolve the issues other than via new profiles, etc. but some bugs/glitches seem to just come and go. like some sessions the hot key doesn’t bring it down. like why, key, that’s your only job here. hehe
having said that, I’ve never heard of tabby so gonna check it out, thanks!
I’ve used Terminator for a while but I admit it’s usually got a bug somewhere - sometimes my profiles disappear, lately I can’t highlight text while new output is happening. But I like splits and tabs and profiles and mouse focus and it has those so I haven’t really shopped around.
