
Ask HN: What terminal emulator do you use ? - code_devil
I use putty and have played with secureCRT. What are the other terminals people in HN use on a daily basis.
======
shadytrees
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...](http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-
unicode/src/urxvt.pm)

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

~~~
barrkel
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
The following PuTTY / PuTTYcyg setting may interest you:

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

------
blasdel
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.

~~~
gaius
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).

~~~
yangyang
That's a shell, not a terminal emulator.

~~~
nailer
You can use Powershell as a tabbed terminal too.

~~~
yangyang
You're confusing shells and terminal emulators (if you can call them that
under windows).

You can use the "Powershell ISE" thing as a tabbed "terminal", but Powershell
itself will quite happily run under the windows console "terminal emulator".

~~~
nailer
I am indeed using the term 'Powershell' to mean both the language and the
ISE/terminal. I am doing this because the authors of Powershell do the same.

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

~~~
antileet
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>

~~~
glymor
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...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/vte/+bug/29787/comments/32)

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.

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

~~~
GeneralMaximus
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.

~~~
randallsquared
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.

~~~
pyre
> _(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)._

Try GNU screen or tmux.

~~~
randallsquared
I use screen on my servers to avoid losing history and for running non-
daemons, but I find it convenient to have "physical" tabs to remind me of
where I am.

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

------
mickt
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
+1 for Guake.

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

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

~~~
xenoterracide
for a 1 time command that I don't need to look at again I'd just use alt+f2
kde's 'run prompt' is pretty good. of course it doesn't actually provide the
'shell environment'.

------
sykora
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.

------
makecheck
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.

~~~
apotheon
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>

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

~~~
apotheon
True -- but I like the way AHWM works more than the way Compiz works, so
that's not really a concern for me.

~~~
pyre
You could also try to stomach xcompmgr for compositing...

~~~
apotheon
Wikipedia's information about it confuses me. It says xcompmgr is a window
manager, but it says it "does not replace any existing window manager". Does
this mean it would replace AHWM, or that it would just add compositing to AHWM
-- or something else entirely?

Also . . . what about it is difficult to "stomach"?

~~~
pyre
xcompmgr is a Composite manager. It will run along side any other window
manager (that doesn't already do compositing... this excludes Compiz, newer
KWin, Xfce4's window manager, but exactly what would happen if you tried to
run xcompmgr and Compiz at the same time I don't know). It _just_ does things
like add drop shadows around windows and enable true transparency. {edit} You
can configure the drop-shadows or disable them through command-line options
{/edit}

I said 'stomach' because xcompmgr has been unstable at times in my experience.
IIRC, none of the xcompmgr crashes have taken down X11 or the window manager.
I have not used it in a while though so it may have changed, but I was under
the impression that it doesn't get much work done on it. It's original goal
was just to be a reference/example implementation of the compositing extension
for X. I could be wrong though and it might be in a more stable state now.

If anything you might be motivated to see if there is a way to run it with
debugging information. I can't imagine it's highly complex in the way that I
assume Compiz is. It might be fairly easy to do some fixing up of it, as long
as a person is motivated to look into it.

~~~
apotheon
Thanks for the information. I think I'll give that a look on a test system, if
only to see whether I care enough to bother.

------
graywh
Xterm.

~~~
kbob
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
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.

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

------
christefano
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

------
poltergeist
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.

------
warp
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... :)

------
barrkel
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.

~~~
pyre
> _Ctrl-A ESC notwithstanding._

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

~~~
barrkel
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.

~~~
pyre
Try Ctrl-A + [ which puts you into 'copy mode' and ] to exit 'copy mode'.
While in copy mode you can use arrow keys and/or page up/down to go through
screen's scrollback buffer.

I usually run anything that will have a wall of text piped to less anyways
(with or without screen).

------
bwhite
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.)

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

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

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

------
fix3r
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)

------
yangyang
What's next then?

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

------
iterationx
eterm is kinda fun <http://www.enlightenment.org/>

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

A good companion to xmonad.

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

------
slig
iTerm, on tiger.

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

~~~
slig
Same here...

------
bdwalter
xterm

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

~~~
pyre
* 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.

~~~
pwmanagerdied
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.

------
tdziuba
Terminator. Fuck yeah.

