@@idogaming3532 This is not clickbait as the title accurately describes the video, the thumbnail isn't entirely misleading they used it to just grab people's attentions.
I'm a computer science tutor and I actually love Yakuake. I use it for running marking scripts on my students' work, where the script launches their work in my web browser and hides the terminal automatically, then I just have to hit Meta+F12 then enter to pull up the next person's work. It's a bit niche, but damn it works well!
I'm a terminator user myself, but I don't live in the CLI. I run a few aliases manually, enjoy the transparency and window splitting functionality. Terminator just didn't make the cut eh? :-)
Terminator is great for the split screen although it is a bit quirky to reenter split screen from a zoom. I have a two by two auto start with my htop, iotop, logging tools
Terminator always got a place in my heart. its what I started with and probably used the most. I eventually switched to alacritty once I got real familiar with tmux.
@@juicy1nonly same but i use tmux only when i want multiple shells on one terminal like the tabs in terminator and when i want to split i use my window manager + script to set the Working directory whenever i open new terminal to last logged working directory
I've been switching over to Alacritty as my primary terminal, but I will say that Yakuake is awesome for a quick-use terminal when I'm on KDE. I agree that it isn't useful in a tiling window manager, but in a DE, being able to have that quick drop down terminal to run a quick command (while being able to use the rest of my screen), is really handy sometimes. Very good video as always!
I went back and forth between alacritty and kitty a couple times, but finally settled on kitty and have been with it past couple years. They are both great and very comparable, and I do like alacritty's yaml config better. I don't even remember exactly what it was that lead to my decision, I think it was something to do with some font rendering issue I was having at the time.
xfce-terminal also supports the drop down like yakuake (I used yakuake over a decade ago on kde3). It is a command line option "xfce4-terminal --drop-down", map that to a key in the dektop environment, and your are ready to go.
For st (and various other suckless programs) you can use the xresources patch to have dynamic settings, without needing to recompile them. You can also use signals to… signal those programs Xresources have changed and they should reload them. I think you could use that kinda stuff for the whole change-color script for DT-OS
You should try wezterm someday. Written mostly in rust, the rest in c/c++. It's config is written in lua script. GPU accelerated. Every possible feature that terminal emulator can have is built-in. Almost every possible color scheme is built-in (285 pcs). The best support for unicode/emoji I have ever seen.
One important note: ST does *not* handle Unicode as well as Alacritty. I regularly work with Ancient Greek and other non-English text in my terminal emulator, and Alacritty handles it perfectly. In fact, it is just about the only terminal emulator that does. This is the same in every GNU/Linux distribution in which I have tried it (chiefly Debian and Manjaro) and FreeBSD. You were, of course, right about Unicode in URXVT and XTerm. Both of them fail to handle much of what lies outside of unaccented Latin characters. Thanks for another excellent review video, DT :)
@@folksurvival I tend to favor minimalism, so I have not gone out of my way to install Kitty, but testing its Unicode support is a good idea. I think that another full-length, comprehensive terminal emulator review from DT is in order (he made one a few years ago that is still mostly relevant and very helpful but contains a few key minor errors, including points pertaining to Unicode). Let me know what you find with Kitty :)
Personally, I use lxterminal, and I satisfied with it. The problem with Alacritty and Kitty is that striving for performance, they use their own renderers and disregard xft font settings of subpixel rendering, hinting and antialiasing, and because of that some glyphs (like m and w in JetBrains Mono, for example) look really shitty. The author of Kitty is aware of this issue, but he refuses to fix it, because this would hit the "performance" of the emulator. So, this is the reason I don't use these terminals, because I really appreciate my eyes and I don't want them to spill out because of shitty fonts.
Same here, but I also use LXTerminal and ST because they do NOT require a recent enough GPU to run, or to run with good performances, try to run Alacritty for example on an old ThinkPad SL510, you can't. You have to disable GPU acceleration with a launch option and the performances instantly drops significantly lower than any other terminal emulator out there. And because I like having a consistent setup for all my installations, no matter the hardware : Be it ancient and crusty or really modern and fast, I use what works best on the old crusty computers that I consider good on my main computer too. This also makes it so that my main computer feels stupidly fast, as it uses almost the exact same setup that I use on a computer from 2004.
@@atemoc Yeah, st doesn't have that font rendering glitch I mentioned before, but I'm rather lazy to properly patch it (I use Gentoo btw, and proper patching here requires manipulating with portage). But what I've noticed, when using tmux inside st, it becomes around 2 times slower, even slower than lxterminal with tmux (curiously enough, in lxterminal, tmux has marginal impact on performance, for whatever reason).
The same developer of kitty also marked slow startup issues as "wontfix". I don't understand why terminal developers care so much for performance if they take 3 seconds to open... I switched to st ever since.
I'd like to recommend wezterm for your consideration. I think you should find it quite comparable to alacritty and kitty. Also, cool-retro-term was missing from the list.
Last time I tried it, it was greedy towards hotkeys. Like there is a setting that supposed to disable hotkeys, but it still didn't disable them all. Which means if you use something hotkey heavy (like FAR manager), you are going to have bad times. I remember it was being reported to their Github repo, so they might've fixed it.
Well... There isn't much. For the ones that work with the majority of websites: There's - Firefox - Chromium (with coat of paint) - Chromium - Safari (webkit part, mostly)
I knew it was a clickbaity thumbnail and went straight to the end to see the real one, lol I use both alacritty for general terminal stuff and kitty for programming with neovim (has font ligatures and displays images)
xterm originally was a demo program from the early days of X - a proper terminal prog was expected to be written later but as its longevity showed it was good enough for many
Hey DT, this is unrelated to the topic of this video, but I would like to talk a bit about the Moonlander keyboard. Thou made multiple videos for these kinds of keyboards, the one for the ErgoDox EZ, the one for the Moonlander unboxing, the one for the Planck, and the one where you explain why you are using these types of keyboard (and let us not forget about the trackball mice!). As far as I know (I will talk for the Moonlander keyboard here), thou are still using a slightly modified version of the original layout, right? If this is the case, I may only encourage you to check the new version, it dropped very recently, a brand-new firmware update, and it is pretty cool, as it removes the need for the Oryx key (so you can put any other key on here), fixes a few issues, changes the default startup sounds, and adds some new functionalities such as a key to capitalize only a single word, which I found very useful whilst coding. I also wanted to ask, have thou ever considered using an alternative keyboard layout, or do thou think it is not worth it for thou? When I received my Moonlander keyboard (that I bought also partially thanks to the videos thou have made), I experimented with more than a hundred of different variations of different layouts, until I found the best one for me (anyone can find them by searching "atmo" with "anonymous layouts" checked, and the one I use daily by unchecking the "anonymous layouts" button). Because of the alternative layout that I use (a slightly modified version of the ISRT keyboard layout, and with entirely custom layers), I had a lot of free keys that were never being used on my Moonlander, and for the longest time I wondered what I could use them for. Recently, whilst re-configure the Qtile window manager, I had an idea: I can simply use these buttons as one-key shortcuts that make it so that I don't have to press multiple keys, or even remember more obscure ones. I use them for program menus, custom scripts, window management, desktop/group management, and a lot more, and I found they really improve my usage of window managers under GNU/Linux. I think thou could perhaps enjoy trying something like this out, if you can find a use for it. Sorry for any mistakes, English is not my native language, I am actually French! Baguette !
Also I agree with you that the DE terminals are pretty good. They integrate with the DE that they are built for...and honestly, if you are using one of the DEs, you would probably be fine with the term that comes with it!
Hey DT, I love how you mess up the tier list on thumbnails, Alacritty is my terminal of choice, beautiful, a preconfigured config file that you only uncomment what you need and adjust the values. Goes well with my Qtile.
Wouldn’t make sense for a DistroTube video, but iterm2 on mac is excellent as well. Fast, configurable, great tmux integration, community developed. Good stuff.
I use Bismuth on kwin as my window manager, so I have tiling built in, and I use Yakuake. I really like being able to have it drop down with the press of a button no matter what desktop I'm on and what I'm currently working on. I was actually surprised to see it as it's own terminal emulator, since I consider it more of an extension to konsole, even if it really isn't. It's reall useful on my hacked chromebook with a really small screen, where opening a second window for a terminal on a single screen makes everything unusable, and I'm not used to constantly switching desktops, so a drop down is faster.
Urxvt user here. After using it for a couple of years I discovered how to tweak it to display well glyphs and symbols. Also, it has the advantage that it can display images easily in the terminal with ranger or yazi. I think a terminal that is lightweight, uses less resources is always better than a resource hungry one, for it enables the user to have more free resources available to run resource hungry programs like Ollama AI. I think with terminals less is more
I had to watch to make sure you were just kidding about my beloved kitty! Whew. Sigh of relief. You put it in its proper tier. I've been enjoying these tier lists. Thank you!
URxvt being vanilla is fine for me. I hadn't felt like I missed out not having used the fancier terminals like Alacritty. In fact Xterm is also fine, it's got a lot of historical cruft, but it also isn't on that list of software that will break due to some bratty ideologue's concept of "positive change".
I run xterm sometimes, because of the noseprint/tiny font, useful for monitoring htop and bpytop, and log to file. It's Okay for me, rather than meh. Currently I'm using Tilix. I am happy with that.
I was mildly surprised that you rated Xterm so low, but it set me thinking. I've used XTerm since I first saw a Unix window manager back somewhere around 91 or 92, so thirty years ago. So maybe my fondness for it is just familiarity rather than genuine utility? Ah, well your one concrete complaint was it not handling Unicode "out of the box" so I sort of wondered if I'd tinkered with the example I'm, using, but no it's virginal from the distro. And it handles Unicode just fine. I've got four on the screen right now. One is bit because it's running bpytop so I can keep an eye on things. One isn't so big but has larger text, I've been in a directory cleaning up some cruft. The third is a red on buff colour scheme because it's doing a remote log-in and the last is old-school amber on black to remind me that I'm root in there. So no, I do not concur and see no reason to consider changing any time soon! 😀
What drew my attention to this video was eDex-UI, I discovered this project a few years ago and thought it was simply beautiful, I was sad to see that it was discontinued :(
Still using my custom st build (with ligatures, transparency and a couple of other patches). Patching st (just as any other suckless software) is a major challenge, especially when doing it for the first time. However, once configured to your liking, st is actually highly portable. Configure it once, install it on as many machines as you like.
There's nothing really special to it to justify being any higher rated that OK, it does it's job, nothing fancy, doesn't have any real non-standard features that make it stand out, it's just a terminal
i agree it works great but i can't ignore it's weird bug where there's always a space on the bottom whenever the terminal is aligned to the left or right. See comparison with alacritty - 0x0.st/oQ6r.png
@@victorbrand8913 I'll definitely try it. I mean my PC is decent but still there should be at least 100mb of RAM to save. Currently it runs at idle 700mb of running KDE.
Hey Dt, I wanted to ask your opinion on Opensuse Tumbleweed, I've been using it for a few months now (I was a Debian testing kind of guy) and I found it to be utterly fantastic. Recently you made a video asking why KaOs wasn't more popular, but in that regard I think Opensuse is the most unfairly underestimated distribution there is in regard to the quality of the products they have been releasing for decades. They ought to be as big as Fedora or Ubuntu. Have you tried it recently? Do you have an opinion? Thanks for the videos.
This and Solus Plasma are the only two rolling releases that I've found to be super stable (been on Solus since the Plasma spin went official). I tried to look at KaOS after the last video but their June ISO is broken and won't install in a VM.
@Ichigo Kurosaki That's a bit radical, Debian and Slackware are super cool. And if you use their testing and current versions, they are kind of rolling release too. Even Gentoo is very cool for what it is, although admittedly that one isn't for me.
I am glad to see we are a few to appreciate OpenSuse's qualities here. But then why is it they have so little market share, why is there so little content on O.S. on youtube, etc?
I see your point about st. The thing with st is that it is what you are willing to work to get! You can literally make it anything you want...so, depending on your willingness, it can be absolute crap or the absolute best! I think I would have put it in GOOD for that reason (cuz you decide where it goes)
@@madthumbs1564 I've used tdrop and it has some limitations compared to Yakuake. With the latter you get shortcuts to resize the dropdown window, it remembers the settings + you get nice animation. It's also now tied to only Xorg. And some of my installs for some reason I just can't get tdrop to work.
yakuake, is my terminal of choice, granted I don't use a tiling window manager but having one drop down with a hot key at any given moment is just useful. For example, when an application misbehaves you can launch it in terminal then open the terminal again to check up on it quickly, same for tasks running in the background, it just works really well for me. It's also the same terminal that exists in the entire kde desktop which is also convenient as I am quite firmly into the ecosystem.
Thank you DT. I'm new to Linux, and I love your channel. I have MX Linux using their XFCE distro. It comes with the XFCE term. I also have the XTerm terminal. I prefer the XFCE terminal, it seems to be easier to use for someone unfamiliar with the CLI. Maybe it is something with me and what I am used to, the machine I have had for 11 years ìs a 2011 Intel Mac mini. I look forward tto your videos, they definetly influence my invesigations of software and systems.
Good all-rounder: Tilix - not great, not terrible, has tabs, quake mode for DEs. Not GPU accelerated but that can be useful as a terminal when your nvidia drivers go real wrong In the same tier as Alacritty & Kitty: foot. Not GPU accelerated as well, haven't used it much but it seems like really good stuff. Also: I'd put Alacritty to the Meh tier. It just has so many issues it becomes really annoying at some point. Side note: tmux is fine but if you're using a super fast GPU-accelerated emulator, your bottleneck is probably tmux now, so when it comes to GPU-acceleration you *kinda* need the tabs/splits to be handled by the terminal itself.
I tried Kitty because I wanted a better image support in the terminal, but kitty has some issues with SSH which is a dealbreaker if you using SSH all the time. So will keep with Alacritty :)
The ssh problems are caused by the remote host not knowing what features kitty is capable of. You can fix this by uploading its termcap file which kitty will do for you if you launch ssh as a kitten
That Tier List app needs to go straight to the top tier of a tier-lists-app apps tier list. 👁️👄👁️✌️ --EDIT: there's another fun terminal emulator I like to play around with called "Twin", it mimics an old Windows 1.0 look with multiple terminals that can be resized etc.
GREAT LIST! I love the rankings. Absolutely Correct Info. Some of my favorites are: LXTerminal [GOOD], Xterm [MEH], Yakuake [GREAT], and... Lilyterm (lightweight and simple)
Xterm with a good TrueType font has more than enough bling for me. The only terminal that has come close to making my want to switch is the terminal in vscode. Although there isn't a good standalone xterm.js terminal that is to my liking yet
I am sure there is some 500 MB Electron-based terminal out there that would suit be suitable for those who enjoy the multiple-second startup times and JS bloat.
I made a quick memory test on some terminals. I was interested in Konsole, Kitty, qterminal, Urxvt. on average it seems Konsole instance uses 1,5 % of my memory, Kitty as qterminal 1,2%, urxvt 0,3%... I didnt want to do cpu tests cos I dont know how to do them properely, but the memory results are quite consistent.
Xfce-terminal can be used as a drop-down terminal too, like Yakuake. It was what I was using most often and imo it is better than the other simple not fancy ones. On Plasma I would use Konsole and Yakuake, for example, but I prefer the Xfce way. One more simple application in place of two that doesn't lack anything important in my opinion.
I like Qterminal, its super lightweight, opens instantly, supports tabs, has horizontal and vertical terminal splitting, it even has a find feature, its pretty feature full for such a lightweight app, I think its only about 150 KiB in download size.
Tbf, eDex-UI was literally made as a joke, and I don’t think it was ever intended to be an actual terminal emulator for people to use. It’s based on electron and it has a lot of stuff thrown into it that make it a really bloated program. It’s like the DOOM Emacs or the LunarVim of terminal emulation.
Termond works for me... I did have an issue about a year ago where it randomly stopped working... But a few days later there was an update that fixed the issue. Now a days is work just like normal
I've tried most terminals that you ranked today but I always keep coming back to terminator. There is nothing else quite like it. It has everything you will ever need. The only terminal that beats it is the new Microsoft terminal. To this day I am unable to find a single Linux terminal that can match all of its features. Terminator is the closest option but stuff like background blur is still missing. profile shortcuts are also not a thing.
no wezterm? I've been running it as my sole terminal since 2021. Default color theme looks nice, has a TON of functionality (multiplexing, ssh session, lua config, etc.) for pretty much being one developer's hobby project, written in rust so pretty efficient, has support for Kitty's image protocol and iterm's as well, which many TEs lack. My only gripes with it is that the license (Expat) is shit (non-copyleft in the slightest), and that it crashes every now and then, which can be quite annoying
I'm in full agreement about XTerm -- I've never cared for it at all. I use Debian with Openbox on my laptop, and I swapped out XTerm with LXTerminal, since, AFAIK, I can't adjust the text size for my aging eyes.
I can adjust the text size on XTerm dynamically by as simple as a Ctrl+Right Click to open the vte menu, and statically by specifying a font size via XResources
Bug or feature request. Do not add all the elements that are already added in the list at the bottom so you get duplicates. Only those that are not already placed in the bottom row. Except for that, it looks like it works as expected, and that is good.
What libvte performance issues are you talking about? I ran a simple test: $ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=500 | strings >test.txt $ time cat test.txt And GNOME Terminal took almost half the time Konsole needed to output that test file.
I really like Yakuake. Drop down terminals let me really quickly drop in a command or pop open a python shell as a scratch pad. I wouldn't really spend more than a few minutes in one, but they're also handy for background tasks (like a backup) or resource monitors (btop etc.) that you just wanna check on shortly.
I don't think that there is any difference in any of them. All are the same. Well I use urxvt but to me it doesn't matter which emulator I'm using. All I want is to enter the 🐚
Weird, I find xterm way better than alacritty, kitty, and terminator, mostly because of latency and startup time (20ms start vs 400ms). Unicode works just fine w/ Nerd fonts, xterm-256 does fine, NeoVim w/ 100+ plugins is fine, and it looks exactly the same except for window transparency. What a weird take to say "people use xterm because its cool". Wtf? Isn't that why people use modern ones? (GPU accelerated WHOAHHHH) You use xterm if you understand the science behind latency and care about startup time.
One thing I could never understand when people talk about their favorite terminal(s), is performance. I mean, I have yet to see a terminal emulator that is slow. Ugly? Yes. Awkward? Check. But slow? How do you make a terminal emulator that is slow?
It is more of a question how do you make a terminal emulator that is fast? Using GPU acceleration, like Alacritty and Kitty do. And it is really visible when running a program that produces a lot of text output (like few thousands lines). In this case the performance difference may be significant. But of course you do not usually run commands that produce thousands of lines of output, so it is really almost useless benefit.
@@viacheslav1392 In the last 8 years or so, I've been developing several "backend" type pieces of software (serving clients over http, amqp, mqtt, stuff like that). Also, I like having detailed logs, because when something fails, you have either logged what happened or you're sitting there scratching your head. So when I'm ssh'ing into a server, watching a log file with tail -f and it scrolls before my eyes like crazy, what extra performance do I need? I honestly am happy with every terminal emulator I've used, they're all plenty fast.
@@Booruvcheek yeh. I agree. The argument about performance is mostly comming from the rust fanboys, because alacritty is written in rust, or from the people that just want to be on the trend to make youtube videos like DT.
I love konsole... its super configurable and works great with zsh, starship, etc
2 года назад+2
My list would be much different, I'd place st, urxvt and xterm on top because they're the fastest and most responsive. Konsole and gnome-terminal are easy to configure. Alacrity and Kitty takes a little longer to open.
@ Well I'm just at the start of my Linux journey. I'm not experienced enough to already have favorites because I barely use the terminal to it's actual potential.
Loving the bait you're throwing on your thumbnail, it automatically makes me want to watch the video out of juxtaposed rage.
Yup. I watched this video to learn why DT thought Kitty was so bad.
I just skip to the end now
@@barbietripping lmfao same here
Clickbait is bad.
@@idogaming3532 This is not clickbait as the title accurately describes the video, the thumbnail isn't entirely misleading they used it to just grab people's attentions.
0:00 Intro
-------------
3:09 Alacritty
5:16 eDex-UI
6:12 GNOME Terminal
7:43 LXTerminal, XFCE-Terminal
8:20 Kitty
9:53 Konsole
10:56 St
13:12 Termonad
14:46 Urxvt, Xterm
18:10 Yakuake
20:08 qterminal
-------------
20:39 Outro
@@lashedup ya
eDex-UI is the perfect terminal emulator when you bring your really old ThinkPad out in public...not that I go outside, I use arch.
I'm a computer science tutor and I actually love Yakuake. I use it for running marking scripts on my students' work, where the script launches their work in my web browser and hides the terminal automatically, then I just have to hit Meta+F12 then enter to pull up the next person's work. It's a bit niche, but damn it works well!
I'm a terminator user myself, but I don't live in the CLI. I run a few aliases manually, enjoy the transparency and window splitting functionality. Terminator just didn't make the cut eh? :-)
I am also using Terminator. When I started using window manager, I enjoyed window size in terminal window header.
Terminator is great for the split screen although it is a bit quirky to reenter split screen from a zoom. I have a two by two auto start with my htop, iotop, logging tools
Terminator always got a place in my heart. its what I started with and probably used the most. I eventually switched to alacritty once I got real familiar with tmux.
@@juicy1nonly same but i use tmux only when i want multiple shells on one terminal like the tabs in terminator and when i want to split i use my window manager + script to set the Working directory whenever i open new terminal to last logged working directory
# for alacritty
cd(){
builtin cd "$1" && shift && echo "$PWD" > ~/.mystuff/pwdbk;
}
builtin cd $(cat ~/.mystuff/pwdbk);
I've been switching over to Alacritty as my primary terminal, but I will say that Yakuake is awesome for a quick-use terminal when I'm on KDE. I agree that it isn't useful in a tiling window manager, but in a DE, being able to have that quick drop down terminal to run a quick command (while being able to use the rest of my screen), is really handy sometimes.
Very good video as always!
I went back and forth between alacritty and kitty a couple times, but finally settled on kitty and have been with it past couple years. They are both great and very comparable, and I do like alacritty's yaml config better. I don't even remember exactly what it was that lead to my decision, I think it was something to do with some font rendering issue I was having at the time.
xfce-terminal also supports the drop down like yakuake (I used yakuake over a decade ago on kde3). It is a command line option "xfce4-terminal --drop-down", map that to a key in the dektop environment, and your are ready to go.
For st (and various other suckless programs) you can use the xresources patch to have dynamic settings, without needing to recompile them. You can also use signals to… signal those programs Xresources have changed and they should reload them.
I think you could use that kinda stuff for the whole change-color script for DT-OS
that is how you configure most older X programs, like xterm, emacs etc.
You should try wezterm someday. Written mostly in rust, the rest in c/c++. It's config is written in lua script. GPU accelerated. Every possible feature that terminal emulator can have is built-in. Almost every possible color scheme is built-in (285 pcs). The best support for unicode/emoji I have ever seen.
agree with u. and i am using foot.
One important note: ST does *not* handle Unicode as well as Alacritty. I regularly work with Ancient Greek and other non-English text in my terminal emulator, and Alacritty handles it perfectly. In fact, it is just about the only terminal emulator that does. This is the same in every GNU/Linux distribution in which I have tried it (chiefly Debian and Manjaro) and FreeBSD.
You were, of course, right about Unicode in URXVT and XTerm. Both of them fail to handle much of what lies outside of unaccented Latin characters.
Thanks for another excellent review video, DT :)
Have you tried Kitty?
@@folksurvival I tend to favor minimalism, so I have not gone out of my way to install Kitty, but testing its Unicode support is a good idea.
I think that another full-length, comprehensive terminal emulator review from DT is in order (he made one a few years ago that is still mostly relevant and very helpful but contains a few key minor errors, including points pertaining to Unicode).
Let me know what you find with Kitty :)
Try wezterm
Personally, I use lxterminal, and I satisfied with it.
The problem with Alacritty and Kitty is that striving for performance, they use their own renderers and disregard xft font settings of subpixel rendering, hinting and antialiasing, and because of that some glyphs (like m and w in JetBrains Mono, for example) look really shitty. The author of Kitty is aware of this issue, but he refuses to fix it, because this would hit the "performance" of the emulator. So, this is the reason I don't use these terminals, because I really appreciate my eyes and I don't want them to spill out because of shitty fonts.
Same here, but I also use LXTerminal and ST because they do NOT require a recent enough GPU to run, or to run with good performances, try to run Alacritty for example on an old ThinkPad SL510, you can't.
You have to disable GPU acceleration with a launch option and the performances instantly drops significantly lower than any other terminal emulator out there.
And because I like having a consistent setup for all my installations, no matter the hardware : Be it ancient and crusty or really modern and fast, I use what works best on the old crusty computers that I consider good on my main computer too.
This also makes it so that my main computer feels stupidly fast, as it uses almost the exact same setup that I use on a computer from 2004.
@@atemoc Yeah, st doesn't have that font rendering glitch I mentioned before, but I'm rather lazy to properly patch it (I use Gentoo btw, and proper patching here requires manipulating with portage). But what I've noticed, when using tmux inside st, it becomes around 2 times slower, even slower than lxterminal with tmux (curiously enough, in lxterminal, tmux has marginal impact on performance, for whatever reason).
@@victorbrand8913 I do not use tmux myself, but this is interesting to hear.
OMG so that is why. tysm
The same developer of kitty also marked slow startup issues as "wontfix". I don't understand why terminal developers care so much for performance if they take 3 seconds to open... I switched to st ever since.
I love the thumbnails for these tier lists
still waiting for the distro tier list
LinuxFX will probably be on the very top :-)
WindowsFX will probably be on the very top :-)
Arch Linux btw
linux from scratch will be under okay
@Aleksandar Milović Sir, please take your list and get out of here.
I'd like to recommend wezterm for your consideration. I think you should find it quite comparable to alacritty and kitty. Also, cool-retro-term was missing from the list.
Last time I tried it, it was greedy towards hotkeys. Like there is a setting that supposed to disable hotkeys, but it still didn't disable them all. Which means if you use something hotkey heavy (like FAR manager), you are going to have bad times. I remember it was being reported to their Github repo, so they might've fixed it.
Hey DT, maybe someone suggested this already, but how about a (FOSS) web browser tier list?
+1 for this, especially as I know that DT has used, is using, a few of them!
Dillo and Lynx lol
Firefox (based) or go home.
Unless we're talking about TUI ones. There are a bunch of great ones of those for simpler things.
Well... There isn't much.
For the ones that work with the majority of websites:
There's
- Firefox
- Chromium (with coat of paint)
- Chromium
- Safari (webkit part, mostly)
I knew it was a clickbaity thumbnail and went straight to the end to see the real one, lol
I use both alacritty for general terminal stuff and kitty for programming with neovim (has font ligatures and displays images)
There is one termnial that is missing that I really like: Tilix. It's quite handy and in my opinion better than Gnome's default terminal.
You can also add MATE terminal to the OK tier as well. It's just the GNOME terminal reworked for MATE's GTK2 framework.
:)
MATE terminal is gtk3 not gtk2
@@nevoyu ah. They migrated it to GTK3 then. Oh well.
Konsole "monitor for silence/activity" is a blessing for so many tasks, and like many KDE apps is extremely customizable.
I love to use Tilix in Gnome and I put in the Good category. It has built in split functionality and it's so lightweight
xterm originally was a demo program from the early days of X - a proper terminal prog was expected to be written later but as its longevity showed it was good enough for many
Hey DT, this is unrelated to the topic of this video, but I would like to talk a bit about the Moonlander keyboard.
Thou made multiple videos for these kinds of keyboards, the one for the ErgoDox EZ, the one for the Moonlander unboxing, the one for the Planck, and the one where you explain why you are using these types of keyboard (and let us not forget about the trackball mice!).
As far as I know (I will talk for the Moonlander keyboard here), thou are still using a slightly modified version of the original layout, right?
If this is the case, I may only encourage you to check the new version, it dropped very recently, a brand-new firmware update, and it is pretty cool, as it removes the need for the Oryx key (so you can put any other key on here), fixes a few issues, changes the default startup sounds, and adds some new functionalities such as a key to capitalize only a single word, which I found very useful whilst coding.
I also wanted to ask, have thou ever considered using an alternative keyboard layout, or do thou think it is not worth it for thou?
When I received my Moonlander keyboard (that I bought also partially thanks to the videos thou have made), I experimented with more than a hundred of different variations of different layouts, until I found the best one for me (anyone can find them by searching "atmo" with "anonymous layouts" checked, and the one I use daily by unchecking the "anonymous layouts" button).
Because of the alternative layout that I use (a slightly modified version of the ISRT keyboard layout, and with entirely custom layers), I had a lot of free keys that were never being used on my Moonlander, and for the longest time I wondered what I could use them for.
Recently, whilst re-configure the Qtile window manager, I had an idea:
I can simply use these buttons as one-key shortcuts that make it so that I don't have to press multiple keys, or even remember more obscure ones.
I use them for program menus, custom scripts, window management, desktop/group management, and a lot more, and I found they really improve my usage of window managers under GNU/Linux.
I think thou could perhaps enjoy trying something like this out, if you can find a use for it.
Sorry for any mistakes, English is not my native language, I am actually French! Baguette !
Also I agree with you that the DE terminals are pretty good. They integrate with the DE that they are built for...and honestly, if you are using one of the DEs, you would probably be fine with the term that comes with it!
Hey DT, I love how you mess up the tier list on thumbnails, Alacritty is my terminal of choice, beautiful, a preconfigured config file that you only uncomment what you need and adjust the values.
Goes well with my Qtile.
I use the exact same setup. Qtile is my favorite window manager and alacritty is my favorite terminal once I set it up the way I liked.
Wouldn’t make sense for a DistroTube video, but iterm2 on mac is excellent as well. Fast, configurable, great tmux integration, community developed. Good stuff.
I'd love to find a Linux terminal as good as iTerm2.
I use Bismuth on kwin as my window manager, so I have tiling built in, and I use Yakuake. I really like being able to have it drop down with the press of a button no matter what desktop I'm on and what I'm currently working on. I was actually surprised to see it as it's own terminal emulator, since I consider it more of an extension to konsole, even if it really isn't. It's reall useful on my hacked chromebook with a really small screen, where opening a second window for a terminal on a single screen makes everything unusable, and I'm not used to constantly switching desktops, so a drop down is faster.
Hey DT, you could do a video on Wezterm terminal
Urxvt user here. After using it for a couple of years I discovered how to tweak it to display well glyphs and symbols. Also, it has the advantage that it can display images easily in the terminal with ranger or yazi. I think a terminal that is lightweight, uses less resources is always better than a resource hungry one, for it enables the user to have more free resources available to run resource hungry programs like Ollama AI. I think with terminals less is more
I had to watch to make sure you were just kidding about my beloved kitty! Whew. Sigh of relief. You put it in its proper tier. I've been enjoying these tier lists. Thank you!
URxvt being vanilla is fine for me. I hadn't felt like I missed out not having used the fancier terminals like Alacritty. In fact Xterm is also fine, it's got a lot of historical cruft, but it also isn't on that list of software that will break due to some bratty ideologue's concept of "positive change".
Also. xterm comes “out of the box” on just about any distro. Runs the same just about anywhere.
Nice list sir. Personal favorites of mine would be Rox-term, LXterm, and mainly dtterm (and it's only coincidence it's named after you 😁)
Would be cool to see a Shell tier list.
Interesting idea. I wonder what tier 'eshell' will go. :D
@@DistroTube knowing you fish would be the only great tier
I tried it all and for me Wezterm is the best, the font rendering is very good
It's the best! Except for very high cpu usage when using on old opengl specification (ES 2.0). Terrible. The rest is absolute top!
I use WezTerm too, would love DT to review it. It is GPU accelerated, has multiplexing, ligatures, tabs, and is very comfortable to use.
I run xterm sometimes, because of the noseprint/tiny font, useful for monitoring htop and bpytop, and log to file. It's Okay for me, rather than meh. Currently I'm using Tilix. I am happy with that.
I was mildly surprised that you rated Xterm so low, but it set me thinking. I've used XTerm since I first saw a Unix window manager back somewhere around 91 or 92, so thirty years ago. So maybe my fondness for it is just familiarity rather than genuine utility?
Ah, well your one concrete complaint was it not handling Unicode "out of the box" so I sort of wondered if I'd tinkered with the example I'm, using, but no it's virginal from the distro. And it handles Unicode just fine.
I've got four on the screen right now. One is bit because it's running bpytop so I can keep an eye on things. One isn't so big but has larger text, I've been in a directory cleaning up some cruft. The third is a red on buff colour scheme because it's doing a remote log-in and the last is old-school amber on black to remind me that I'm root in there.
So no, I do not concur and see no reason to consider changing any time soon! 😀
What drew my attention to this video was eDex-UI, I discovered this project a few years ago and thought it was simply beautiful, I was sad to see that it was discontinued :(
Still using my custom st build (with ligatures, transparency and a couple of other patches).
Patching st (just as any other suckless software) is a major challenge, especially when doing it for the first time. However, once configured to your liking, st is actually highly portable. Configure it once, install it on as many machines as you like.
fr
Alacritty's missing Tab support is international: They expect you to use something like WM's tab feature or Terminal Multiplexers like Tmux.
I think xfce4-terminal is kinda good. Idk it suits my needs on void.
There's nothing really special to it to justify being any higher rated that OK, it does it's job, nothing fancy, doesn't have any real non-standard features that make it stand out, it's just a terminal
i agree it works great but i can't ignore it's weird bug where there's always a space on the bottom whenever the terminal is aligned to the left or right. See comparison with alacritty - 0x0.st/oQ6r.png
@@ish24n yeah that's one thing I don't like
Yeah, I do like it, but I find lxterminal even more lightweight and a little bit faster than xfce4-terminal.
@@victorbrand8913 I'll definitely try it. I mean my PC is decent but still there should be at least 100mb of RAM to save. Currently it runs at idle 700mb of running KDE.
Hey Dt, I wanted to ask your opinion on Opensuse Tumbleweed, I've been using it for a few months now (I was a Debian testing kind of guy) and I found it to be utterly fantastic. Recently you made a video asking why KaOs wasn't more popular, but in that regard I think Opensuse is the most unfairly underestimated distribution there is in regard to the quality of the products they have been releasing for decades. They ought to be as big as Fedora or Ubuntu. Have you tried it recently? Do you have an opinion? Thanks for the videos.
This and Solus Plasma are the only two rolling releases that I've found to be super stable (been on Solus since the Plasma spin went official). I tried to look at KaOS after the last video but their June ISO is broken and won't install in a VM.
It's a great distro, in all honesty. The only reason I'm using arch over it is the AUR. I find Tumbleweed to be better in most other aspects.
@Ichigo Kurosaki That's a bit radical, Debian and Slackware are super cool. And if you use their testing and current versions, they are kind of rolling release too. Even Gentoo is very cool for what it is, although admittedly that one isn't for me.
I am glad to see we are a few to appreciate OpenSuse's qualities here. But then why is it they have so little market share, why is there so little content on O.S. on youtube, etc?
@@themroc8231 What exactly is Slackware's niche/selling point? I've heard of the name sine the early 2000's, but never really tried it.
I see your point about st. The thing with st is that it is what you are willing to work to get! You can literally make it anything you want...so, depending on your willingness, it can be absolute crap or the absolute best! I think I would have put it in GOOD for that reason (cuz you decide where it goes)
Yakuake is the best terminal that I ever used. I love a dropdown terminal, its so convenient.
ConEmu is what I use on Windows, that one also has a dropdown functionality and supports msys2/gitbash
Not only is Yakuake horrible, but you can make just about any terminal a drop down terminal. tdrop, scratch pads, tilda, etc.
@@madthumbs1564 And why would yakuake be horrible?
@@madthumbs1564 I've used tdrop and it has some limitations compared to Yakuake. With the latter you get shortcuts to resize the dropdown window, it remembers the settings + you get nice animation. It's also now tied to only Xorg. And some of my installs for some reason I just can't get tdrop to work.
Yep dropdown is one of the best features terminal can have IMO.
yakuake, is my terminal of choice, granted I don't use a tiling window manager but having one drop down with a hot key at any given moment is just useful.
For example, when an application misbehaves you can launch it in terminal then open the terminal again to check up on it quickly, same for tasks running in the background, it just works really well for me.
It's also the same terminal that exists in the entire kde desktop which is also convenient as I am quite firmly into the ecosystem.
Hey DT how about a video on Terminal File Managers? Would really be useful.
Like MC? That would be cool
Thank you DT. I'm new to Linux, and I love your channel. I have MX Linux using their XFCE distro. It comes with the XFCE term. I also have the XTerm terminal. I prefer the XFCE terminal, it seems to be easier to use for someone unfamiliar with the CLI. Maybe it is something with me and what I am used to, the machine I have had for 11 years ìs a 2011 Intel Mac mini. I look forward tto your videos, they definetly influence my invesigations of software and systems.
You should try the foot terminal, is the default with sway
Good all-rounder: Tilix - not great, not terrible, has tabs, quake mode for DEs. Not GPU accelerated but that can be useful as a terminal when your nvidia drivers go real wrong
In the same tier as Alacritty & Kitty: foot. Not GPU accelerated as well, haven't used it much but it seems like really good stuff.
Also: I'd put Alacritty to the Meh tier. It just has so many issues it becomes really annoying at some point.
Side note: tmux is fine but if you're using a super fast GPU-accelerated emulator, your bottleneck is probably tmux now, so when it comes to GPU-acceleration you *kinda* need the tabs/splits to be handled by the terminal itself.
I tried Kitty because I wanted a better image support in the terminal, but kitty has some issues with SSH which is a dealbreaker if you using SSH all the time. So will keep with Alacritty :)
The ssh problems are caused by the remote host not knowing what features kitty is capable of. You can fix this by uploading its termcap file which kitty will do for you if you launch ssh as a kitten
That Tier List app needs to go straight to the top tier of a tier-lists-app apps tier list.
👁️👄👁️✌️ --EDIT: there's another fun terminal emulator I like to play around with called "Twin", it mimics an old Windows 1.0 look with multiple terminals that can be resized etc.
GREAT LIST!
I love the rankings. Absolutely Correct Info. Some of my favorites are: LXTerminal [GOOD], Xterm [MEH], Yakuake [GREAT], and... Lilyterm (lightweight and simple)
Ah, I was planning to make a FOSS tier list app soon, good someone already did.
I'm DT's "meh" category made manifest. Not only do I use urxvt, nano, and i3 as my primaries, but my life itself is just as lackluster.
Xterm with a good TrueType font has more than enough bling for me. The only terminal that has come close to making my want to switch is the terminal in vscode. Although there isn't a good standalone xterm.js terminal that is to my liking yet
I am sure there is some 500 MB Electron-based terminal out there that would suit be suitable for those who enjoy the multiple-second startup times and JS bloat.
let's give the DT-Tierlist creator a donation!
Next video: "I wrote a tier list application in Haskell. As a non-programmer"
I was waiting for this one
Gpu acceleration in a terminal emulator? Guys are you serious? What kind of stuff you're doing in a terminal that might require a gpu acceleration?
I made a quick memory test on some terminals. I was interested in Konsole, Kitty, qterminal, Urxvt.
on average it seems Konsole instance uses 1,5 % of my memory, Kitty as qterminal 1,2%, urxvt 0,3%...
I didnt want to do cpu tests cos I dont know how to do them properely, but the memory results are quite consistent.
@DistroTube why are you baiting people with alacritty, kitty ranked as MEH?
Always does so with tier lists, Distrotube 101
my favorite newschool gpu accelerated terminal is wezterm, which is scriptable in Lua instead of a custom grammar limited config file
Forget 2 terminals, tilix and terminator, good video.
Got me to click by putting alacritty as "meh" in the thumbnail.d Gj DT Gj 👏👏👏
Xfce-terminal can be used as a drop-down terminal too, like Yakuake. It was what I was using most often and imo it is better than the other simple not fancy ones. On Plasma I would use Konsole and Yakuake, for example, but I prefer the Xfce way. One more simple application in place of two that doesn't lack anything important in my opinion.
I like Qterminal, its super lightweight, opens instantly, supports tabs, has horizontal and vertical terminal splitting, it even has a find feature, its pretty feature full for such a lightweight app, I think its only about 150 KiB in download size.
Tbf, eDex-UI was literally made as a joke, and I don’t think it was ever intended to be an actual terminal emulator for people to use. It’s based on electron and it has a lot of stuff thrown into it that make it a really bloated program. It’s like the DOOM Emacs or the LunarVim of terminal emulation.
Because of the intro DT now places in S tier in my "wholesome youtubers tierlist"
The series would only be complete with a distro tier list...
Let the flame wars begin!
browser tier list next?
_Only in Linux will you have 15 versions of a black screen and a channel to review it._
Termond works for me... I did have an issue about a year ago where it randomly stopped working... But a few days later there was an update that fixed the issue. Now a days is work just like normal
Where is Foot? As it is the fastest terminal you will come across.
Have been using terminator for an year, it has been great so far.
Guake is my terminal of choice. Tons of features and works very much like the console in id Tech games.
These tier lists are fuel for comment bombardements 💪😅
Thank you to the guy who created the web app
I've tried most terminals that you ranked today but I always keep coming back to terminator. There is nothing else quite like it. It has everything you will ever need. The only terminal that beats it is the new Microsoft terminal. To this day I am unable to find a single Linux terminal that can match all of its features. Terminator is the closest option but stuff like background blur is still missing. profile shortcuts are also not a thing.
Great thumbnail :D
I just miss Tilix in the list, and I'm sure you'd put in the OK tier as well lol
I've always been an Enlightenment fan, and Terminology always worked great.
no wezterm? I've been running it as my sole terminal since 2021. Default color theme looks nice, has a TON of functionality (multiplexing, ssh session, lua config, etc.) for pretty much being one developer's hobby project, written in rust so pretty efficient, has support for Kitty's image protocol and iterm's as well, which many TEs lack. My only gripes with it is that the license (Expat) is shit (non-copyleft in the slightest), and that it crashes every now and then, which can be quite annoying
Tilix? Terminator?
Next up is file managers Kitty should be in the "Good" tier because the dev is a straight up ass with everyone no matter what it is they ask.
I'm in full agreement about XTerm -- I've never cared for it at all. I use Debian with Openbox on my laptop, and I swapped out XTerm with LXTerminal, since, AFAIK, I can't adjust the text size for my aging eyes.
I can adjust the text size on XTerm dynamically by as simple as a Ctrl+Right Click to open the vte menu, and statically by specifying a font size via XResources
As always with your tier lists, the thumbnail has nothing to do with the actual video xD
Yeah, I don't like that.
It's clickbait from disagreement tactic.
Bug or feature request. Do not add all the elements that are already added in the list at the bottom so you get duplicates. Only those that are not already placed in the bottom row.
Except for that, it looks like it works as expected, and that is good.
What libvte performance issues are you talking about? I ran a simple test:
$ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=500 | strings >test.txt
$ time cat test.txt
And GNOME Terminal took almost half the time Konsole needed to output that test file.
I really like Yakuake. Drop down terminals let me really quickly drop in a command or pop open a python shell as a scratch pad.
I wouldn't really spend more than a few minutes in one, but they're also handy for background tasks (like a backup) or resource monitors (btop etc.) that you just wanna check on shortly.
So a terminal extensively used by the professionals in the IT industry is far lower tier than some niche picks terminals?
I don't think that there is any difference in any of them. All are the same. Well I use urxvt but to me it doesn't matter which emulator I'm using. All I want is to enter the 🐚
Honestly, I really like Windows Terminal. If there was a Linux version for it, I would use it. It's open source after all.
You should definitively make a video about Tilix, there's a lot to say.
Weird, I find xterm way better than alacritty, kitty, and terminator, mostly because of latency and startup time (20ms start vs 400ms). Unicode works just fine w/ Nerd fonts, xterm-256 does fine, NeoVim w/ 100+ plugins is fine, and it looks exactly the same except for window transparency.
What a weird take to say "people use xterm because its cool". Wtf? Isn't that why people use modern ones? (GPU accelerated WHOAHHHH) You use xterm if you understand the science behind latency and care about startup time.
I'd put Yakuake in the great tier, I'm using it all the time
Great! I reckon, the next one should be file managers.
You missed wezterm! Great option, fast, gpu accelerated, written in rust.
One thing I could never understand when people talk about their favorite terminal(s), is performance.
I mean, I have yet to see a terminal emulator that is slow.
Ugly? Yes.
Awkward? Check.
But slow? How do you make a terminal emulator that is slow?
It is more of a question how do you make a terminal emulator that is fast? Using GPU acceleration, like Alacritty and Kitty do. And it is really visible when running a program that produces a lot of text output (like few thousands lines). In this case the performance difference may be significant. But of course you do not usually run commands that produce thousands of lines of output, so it is really almost useless benefit.
@@viacheslav1392 In the last 8 years or so, I've been developing several "backend" type pieces of software (serving clients over http, amqp, mqtt, stuff like that).
Also, I like having detailed logs, because when something fails, you have either logged what happened or you're sitting there scratching your head.
So when I'm ssh'ing into a server, watching a log file with tail -f and it scrolls before my eyes like crazy, what extra performance do I need?
I honestly am happy with every terminal emulator I've used, they're all plenty fast.
@@Booruvcheek yeh. I agree. The argument about performance is mostly comming from the rust fanboys, because alacritty is written in rust, or from the people that just want to be on the trend to make youtube videos like DT.
Have you used CoolRetroTerm at all? It not a daily driver. It's more of a toy. I just wondered if have ever looked at it.
I'd add ny terminal of choice Tilix, but apart from that I agree with the list :)
I use xfce4-terminal as part of the xfce desktop and I didn't really feel the need to change it yet
I love konsole... its super configurable and works great with zsh, starship, etc
My list would be much different, I'd place st, urxvt and xterm on top because they're the fastest and most responsive. Konsole and gnome-terminal are easy to configure. Alacrity and Kitty takes a little longer to open.
What distro do you use?
@@encapsulatio Debian stable 🙂 How about you?
@ Fedora 36.
@@encapsulatio Which are your favorite terminal emulators?
@ Well I'm just at the start of my Linux journey. I'm not experienced enough to already have favorites because I barely use the terminal to it's actual potential.