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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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
ConEmu is a godsend. The configuration options are kind of intricate, but it's awesome to have a cmd/powershell window that acts like every other GUI terminal emulator (like putty) has since forever.
It runs portable, so if I do a consulting gig that involves a metric assload of powershell I can run ConEmu on the client systems without doing an install and just blow it away when I'm done.
I'm kind of puzzled at why when MS came out with PowerShell they stuck to the same crappy console window that cmd.exe used. You'd have thought they would have gained a lot more adoption momentum if there was a gee-whiz new terminal window that came with it.
Hmmm ... cmd.exe is a command line shell.
But cmd.exe is NOT a terminal emulator, not by a long shot.
A terminal emulator, oddly enough, emulates terminals ... VT52, VT102, IBM 3270, and a bunch of other things. You know, like the old school real physical terminals.
So, sorry, but no. cmd.exe is NOT a suitable answer to "what terminal emulator do you use". It's simply not even in the same family as a terminal emulator.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.