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Ask Slashdot: What Terminal Emulator Do You Use?
An anonymous reader writes: Although I spend a considerable amount of my time at work using shell commands and other text-based applications, I've never really given much thought to what terminal emulator I use. A recent article over on Opensource.com rounded up their picks for their seven favorite terminals, but I'm still unsure if it really matters which one I pick. Do you have a favorite terminal emulator, and if so, what makes it your favorite? I'm interested in hearing about that "one killer feature" that really sold you on your choice.
LXTerminal - no dependencies to GNOME, light, supports tabs, moving tabs and naming tabs, copy and paste. I don't need anything else from terminal emulators. http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXTerm...
ZOC is hands down my favorite terminal emulator.
Best emulation, including ANSI. Full scrollback buffers. Zmodem support. Runs on OS/2 *AND* OS X. Love it.
This is more of a Linux thing, Windows users are mostly locked to the OS-provided console UI, but there are a couple apps out there. I used Console2 for a bit, which has a bunch of features over a standard Console window, then I found ConEmu which is what I like to use now. I configured it to work like a Quake-style console which is fun and easily accessible.
Every candidate they list is a local console application using a local framebuffer desktop system.
Real terminal emulators are network detached from a headless server system.
I use PuTTY SSH from Windows, command-line OpenSSH from a native (non-graphical) console for Linux, or VxConnectBot on my Android phone (which has a slider keyboard).
Sometimes I'll actually use an old-school serial-port terminal emulator on an old Amiga to connect to my "desperation serial port" console on my home server. Weird how that thing will be working when must network-based ttys are down.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Terminals are lame. I like being close to the machine, so I wired the serial port right into auditory nerve. I had to drop the bitrate to 7-O-3 to get it to work reliably.
I'm still working on the input part. It's hard to concentrate on input when the damn thing is blasting your ear every few microseconds with noise.
I recently was working on a machine with no internet connectivity trying to visualize some data with gnuplot. Only I discovered that some distros (won't name names here, but it's not an obscure one) by default install gnuplot with no bitmapped graphics support. I thought I was up a creek until I noticed that gnuplot has support for xterms's tektronics graphics mode. While it still has limitations (no color!), it got the job done. I'd like to see your fancy semitransparent Gnome Terminal handle hideously obsolete vector graphics.
I read the internet for the articles.
Defaults that work well give me no incentive to change...so gnome-terminal (known as mate-terminal on most of my systems) and osso-xterm.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you have the misfortune of running a GUI, you can quickly get to a tty with Ctrl-Alt-F1. Who needs emulation?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What about terminal emulating apps?
https://play.google.com/store/...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Guake is the first thing I install on a new distro. Terminal drop-down is only a keypress away.
I use Terminator primarily as well. Nice and useful plugins for it.
I also use tilda bound to F12 for long term, persistent commands, that I want to check on occasionally. VPN connections, etc. It's simple to use, and has a very minimal foot print.
All things being equal, I prefer KDE's Konsole. It has all the features I need or want (tabs, profiles, easy customization) and fits well in the KDE environment.
If I'm using a simple window manager, I go for rxvt because it's lightweight and still hits most of the feature list.
What I actually use the most is Putty thanks to the fact that I'm at work and Windows doesn't include a sane set of utilities.
The hall of shame award goes to Apple's Terminal.app. Horrible handling of the bash key shortcuts.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
For just opening a terminal on my desktop/laptop, I'm using the default mate-terminal (I run Mint w/ MATE).
However, when I'm coding (usually PHP stuff) I use Kate as my editor, and it can use konsole as a terminal at the bottom of the editor. Instead of toggling back and forth between windows, or even switching my focus from one to another on my dual monitor setup, I can see webserver error logs or whatever right there in the editor.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I looked up some pictures and caught myself moving my head to remove the glare...the memories.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
PuTTy. It isn't a "terminal emulator" in the sense that it is the terminal for the local machine. It is used for connecting to all those remote headless servers out there. I'm personally locked into Windows on my workstation for the time being due to other Windows only software requirements, so this is a good bridging application to access all the Linux, FreeBSD, vSphere, and SmartOS machines that I work with.
Whenever I dial up to my ISP on my 1200 baud modem using an acoustic coupler, I prefer using Kermit!
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit...
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
M-x shell in emacs for anything long-running, or where you need copy-paste. M-x rename-buffer lets you run several shells in one emacs. If you have a file opened with tramp e.g. open a file named "/user@other-host:/etc/that-config-file" (i.e. ssh to another system) , M-x shell will launch on that host (at least in recent versions).
Also other shell-based interfaces like mysql, tclsh will usually have their own mode, launced with e.g. M-x sql-mysql .
Emacs does not like ncurses-based apps, so then Xterm needs to be kept around. These days emacs handles normal ansi-colors quite well, though tramp will usually fail if you try to open files on a busybox-based system.
For one-line, one-off commands Xterm or system default.
If you're a sysadmin or devops engineer (or whatever the popular term for unix admin is these days) you're going to want to be able to broadcast input to groups of terminals.
Terminator (Linux)
iTerm2 (OSX)
I use Cathode, a fully-working terminal emulator that visually looks like an old black-and-green CRT monitor.
I like OS X best when it's running Cathode at full-screen. I use the demo version, that starts sputtering and flaking more and more over time. So that fucking $3500 company-issued MacBook with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and 2,8 GHz quad-core Intel i7 looks nothing more than a flickering and dying pile of barely glowing phosphorous horse-shit.
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I use JuiceSSH on my phone, which is amazingly useful more often than it should be necessary. It falls fairly low on that link, for some reason, so maybe I should check the others out.
puTTY on Windows.
Otherwise I'm connected directly to a linux box and just SSH out from a native command line. I don't tend to boot into X unless really necessary, and then I'm normally just stuck with xterm until I can get out of it.
And I don't know when the last time I had to terminal from an apple product is, so I don't even know any more for that one.
You actually have just as many options as any other term emu. I use zsh with Terminal.app just fine. OS X comes with:
/bin/zsh (z shell)
/bin/ksh (korn shell)
/bin/tcsh (t shell)
/bin/bash (default - bourne again shell)
/bin/sh (not bourne shell but bourne-again shell (bash) - it's not symlinked though which is interesting)
You can change it via the chsh command just like any other unix OS or if you feel like pointing and clicking your way there, you can edit Terminal.app's preferences.
If you could articulate WHY you demand that it not be part of a DE, it would be helpful.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia is your friend. "LXTerminal is the standard terminal emulator of LXDE. The terminal is a desktop-independent VTE-based terminal emulator for LXDE without any unnecessary dependency. "
LXTerminal 0.2.0 dependencies: Vte-0.28.2. PERIOD.
Appears to me that there is no rational reason to discount it. You don't have to load LXDE to get LXTerminal.
xterm brags that they have the most faithful emulation of the DEC vt100/220/320/420/520 state machines of any implementation on the market.
I have Cygwin on my office Windows PC, and when I have to work with a VAX or otherwise use a complete and faithful terminal emulation, I use xterm.
If xterm had tabs, I would never use anything else. Since it doesn't, I use gnome-terminal under Cygwin. The xterm maintainer has interesting things to say about gnome-terminal:
...so I use gnome-terminal under Windows for most everything, except when I need extremely high-fidelity.
p.s. I will say that our production floor relies on the Reflections commercial telnet client. They like the old version so much that I had to wrap it in stunnel - there were too many objections to the new(er) ssh versions. I really don't like Reflections myself.
Interesting to note that Mac OS X's default shell was tcsh. I forget which version changed to bash.
I also highly recommend Moba XTerm, at least if your main machine is Windows.
A brief selection of features:
* Tabs. Yes, tabs! After years of using Putty, tabs are amazing.
* Integrated X11 server. No having to fuss with Cygwin and all that; it just works and automatically does the forwarding for you.
* Local *NIX functionality, again, without having to deal with Cygwin manually.
* Free (as in beer).
* Also supports VNC, RDP, (S)FTP.
* Mirroring of input to multiple sessions.
It's a great little piece of software. Never had any reliability issues. I use it daily.
Love sees no species.