My Terminal Emulator Tier List

one of the things i love about the community around this youtube channel is you guys sometimes come up with some ingenious ideas that either i never would have thought to do myself or in some cases i just don't have the skills to do myself and one of the really cool things that someone contributed here in the last few weeks is a couple of months ago i started doing these tier list videos the very first one i did was the text editor tier list where i took like 15 text editors and put them in various tiers from great good okay meh and yuck and what i did is i just did this in i created a simple graphic in for all of the tier list rankings and then i use the same gump graphic because i saved it because i figured i'd do more tier list videos i did another one for a tier list for tiling window managers and again i used yep to do this thing and people were like man that's that's kind of crazy using for something like that why don't you just use a web app so if i go over to my subreddit over at r slash distrotube someone posted this about a week ago seven days ago and you can see free and open source tier list app and he has a github repo it's called dt dash tier list and he also went ahead and put the app on the web at this particular url i'll link to the url of course in the show description and this is his web app running so i thought this is so cool i was so impressed with the work this guy did that i thought in honor of him contributing this app to the community i should make a tier list video today now comes the part where i need to figure out what i should try to rank as a tier list today what kind of applications doing text editors was pretty easy i've used a ton of them using tiling window managers and you know ranking them is pretty easy because i've used so many of them what else have i used a lot of that i feel pretty comfortable i can rank a whole bunch of these things rather quickly terminal emulators so please bear in mind this will be the first time i've used this web app so if i struggle with how to use it just keep that in mind although i think it's pretty self-explanatory i believe if i just started adding something like if i added alacrity hit enter yeah it goes down here and then i could just drag it yeah into the appropriate tier that's pretty cool let me go ahead and plug in i don't know 10 12 terminal emulators i'm going to put all the terminal emulators that i have used extensively over the years and also i'm going to make sure that i include some terminal emulators i've discussed on videos in the past because i know some of you guys if i don't include those are going to ask me about them so it won't be every terminal emulator under the sun because honestly there's like 100 of them that are pretty commonly used on linux we have so many terminal emulators so i'm not going to try to rank all of them i'm just going to stick with the ones that i know the best or the ones that i've covered on video in the past so the terminals i've decided to go with i chose 12 here we're going to rank alacrity edex ui gnome terminal kitty console lx terminal successes simple terminal st terminad xfce terminal urx vt x term and yawkwake and we're going to start with alacrity for those of you that have been following the channel for the last i would say two to three years you know alacrity is kind of my terminal emulator of choice these days and alacrity has to be in the great tier alacrity is one of these new school kind of terminal emulators because it's gpu accelerated which means it's blazing fast alacrity also is really good at rendering unicode characters various glyphs it's also cross-platform which is a big plus and by cross-platform i mean truly cross-platform windows mac and linux is typically what we think cross-platform alacrity has a really nice config file with a ton of options in it that you can you know you can configure it to your heart's content with custom key bindings and theming and things like that one thing about alacrity is it's kind of minimal in design which i like so you don't get tabs with alacrity you also don't get ligature support in alacrity although i think they may be working on that i i've had some conflicting reports on the internet about alacrity and ligatures i don't use ligatures myself but i think they have plans to eventually support ligatures tabs i don't think they really plan on supporting tabs anytime soon but to be honest i won't really fault any of these terminal emulators if they don't have tab support or ligature support because i think those are kind of minor things with terminal emulators because you can get tabbing through other means you don't necessarily need the terminal emulator itself to support tabbing and for those wondering about adding tab support to many of these terminal emulators that don't support tabs there's three ways i can think of you could either use success tabbed program that works and it's one that i've used in the past it's actually a quite nice program another thing you can do if you're a tmux user tmux of course supports tabbing so just launch tmux inside your terminal the other thing you can do if you're using a tiling window manager many of them have a tabbed kind of layout so you can have multiple terminal emulators opened in tabs inside your window manager that works as well moving on to the next terminal emulator is edex ui i did a video about edex ui about four years ago i would say it was a very popular video and a lot of people really found this particular terminal emulator a really neat project it's an electron app and it's something really weird the whole design of it looks kind of futuristic it's something out of a sci-fi movie it has all these whiz-bang effects and widgets on the screen it's not a terminal emulator like you would typically think something really weird and to me i think it's nice as a gimmick but the fact that it's an electron app and the fact that again it's not like a normal terminal emulator it's more for people that want to show off or more for people that they want to have this thing running on their computer to seem like they're hackers edex ui definitely is in the yuck tier it's not something i would actually use as my daily driver as far as my terminal next up is the gnome terminal and for me the gnome terminal i'm going to put in the okay category i could almost put it in the good category it's it's a pretty decent terminal emulator it really has all the basics it has everything that i think most people would expect in a terminal emulator it has tab support it has url detection it has nice graphical menus and you know preferences kind of category you can choose in the menu where you can easily set colors inside the terminal you can set different color schemes and it actually allows you to have multiple profiles in the terminal that way different people can have their own different profile within the terminal or the same person could have different profiles within the terminal you know depending on what kind of work you're doing one day versus the next the only thing that kind of prevents me from making gnome terminal either good or great is the fact that it's part of the gnome project and it's using the vte library which isn't the greatest as far as performance i like things a little bit more fast lightweight especially if you're opening a lot of terminals all the time like i typically am you're probably going to want something not quite as heavy as gnome terminal and i'm going to put a lot of these similar applications because there's several terminal emulators down here that are very similar to gnome terminal as far as their gtk terminals vte terminals they have a lot of the same features functionality and a lot of the same performance problems i can go ahead and tell you right now you know i probably put lx terminal here with it i'd probably put xfce terminal here with it because they're all kind of really very very similar terminal emulators you know everything i could talk about with gnome terminal i could say the same thing about with lx terminal and the xfce4 terminal as well so let's just go ahead and put all of those in the same category they're okay terminals if i had to use them i'm fine with them they're pretty decent terminals if i have options to install other things yes there's several other ones that i think are better choices next up is one of the better choices kitty kitty is very similar to alacrity it's one of these new school gpu accelerated terminal emulators except where alacrity tries to be more minimal you know it does all of the basic features i think most people expect a terminal emulator to do kitty tries to give you everything and the kitchen sink so you know you didn't get tabs or ligatures with alacrity kitty is going to give you both tabs and ligatures so that could be a positive for some people for some people i would say for most people that's probably not a big deal because again tabs and ligatures for me not that big of a deal for a terminal emulator i think one of the cool features with kitty is they have this framework where you can extend kitty it's essentially adding your own scripts to kitty that can be executed inside the the terminal the kitty terminal and these this framework and these scripts are called kittens which is kind of a cute name but that's a really neat feature for a terminal emulator now one downside with kitty it's not a downside where i would knock it out of the great tier but i will save as far as performance i find alacrity to perform a little better than kitty as far as a little lighter a little less ram usage the other thing that could be a knock on kitty for some people because being cross platform is a big deal because a lot of people have to work on windows mac and linux and you can get alacrity on all three platforms kitty as far as i know of does not have a windows version it does have a mac version of course it runs on linux next up is kde's console and console i really have to put it in the good category now i don't use console that often the only time i use console is if i'm in a kde distribution and it's already installed with kde right and i like the terminal now the problem is i never install console if i'm not using kde because there's kde dependencies to it it just doesn't it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but console does so much as far as it's got a ton of features it's got tabbing it's got the split view mode it does transparency well of course you can change color schemes set profiles it has some built-in support with some other plasma features for example you know support or the dolphin file manager again for those using plasma again consoles kind of designed for plasma and that's kind of why i can't really put it in the great tier even though feature-wise it probably belongs there but because it's not as light and it's so tied to kde i've gotta knock it down to just the good tier next up is the terminal emulator i think i'm gonna have the hardest time ranking and that is success st that's the simple terminal and st i still use st i've used st for four or five years now there for about a year or two i used st as my main terminal emulator it's that good right and i still have st installed when i log into my dwm desktop environment uh dwm just trying to keep that full success experience i have sd set as the terminal for that particular window manager and for me i think i'm going to put st i'm going to have to put it as a good option there's some things that really prevent it from being great but the things that it can do and some of the features it has i definitely think it deserves to at least be in the good tier so let's start with the positives why is it good well it's light it's fast it renders unicode characters and glyphs and all of that stuff really well depending on how you patch st it could have ligature support it does not have tab support but being a success project you typically are going to run st inside successes tabbed program to get you tabs or like i mentioned earlier you can just use tmux inside st to also get tabs now let's talk about the negatives with st why is it not in the great tier what's preventing it from being there it's because it's a suckless program meaning you have to patch it for some basic functionality and because you have to patch it and then recompile that's kind of a headache especially when you're making minor changes like if i want to change my color scheme i go set some colors in the st config.h or whatever and then i have to do sudo make install recompile st that is a hassle just for changing colors that's something you don't have to do with any other terminal emulator on this list and that's just kind of strange the other thing is st has gotten better here over the years when i first started using st by default it didn't come with any kind of scroll back feature so you couldn't actually scroll back through the terminal which is crazy you had to patch st to do that now the success guys have come around to where st kind of does this out of the box gives you that scroll back feature but there's still a lot of stuff with st that you're probably going to want to patch st for next up on the list is turbonet and kind of like edex ui termoned it's not a very common terminal emulator the reason i did a video about termonade is because it is a terminal emulator it's one of these vte terminal emulators similar to gnome terminal and some of these other terminal emulators we've talked about so it uses gnomes vte widget library to create their terminal but it's configured in haskell right and you have almost like a xmonet like config file with terminad and you go and edit this thing in haskell you know to set the colors and key bindings and things like that and that was really neat i thought that was a really cool idea something i'd never really seen a terminal emulator do is you know have to use a real programming language to actually configure it and customize it and it's a great idea the problem with terminad is ever since i made that video about it about three four years ago after about six months of using it all of a sudden it no longer worked for me i can't get it to install anymore i can't get it to install on arch linux at all and i can't actually build it myself using something like cabal or stag it i don't think whoever's working on it that they probably at this point probably just abandoned the project i don't know what's going on with it but because it's not really usable i have to put it down here in the yuck category i wouldn't even mention it again i've made the video about it in the past and i figured somebody would ask me about it so let's go ahead and discuss it now right now yeah i can't recommend turmonet at all i doubt you're going to get that thing to work if you try to build it now let's discuss some of the old guard here right ur x v t and x term these are terminal emulators that have been around since the beginning of time so urx xvt i'm gonna put in the mech category in the x term i'm also gonna put in the met category they're very similar terminal emulators they're both very minimal out of the box they're both very ugly and almost unreadable out of the box as far as they were designed in a different computing era where monitors were very small resolution you know 640 by 480 or whatever the health monitor resolutions might have been back in the 1980s and these things you can customize them a little bit so you can go into your x-resources file and customize the colors and the fonts you can you can make them usable and i've used both as my main terminal emulator in the past because they are light i will give them that they're light they're fast they're much better on resources than most of the stuff above them here in the tier list but because they're not that usable out of the box i've gotta knock them a bit i will also say that x term and ur xvt they're not the best at displaying various unicode characters and special glyphs and special characters and you know boxes and things like that x term is a little better than ursbt xterm is okay at displaying some of that stuff it's not great urix bt is actually horrible displaying some unicode stuff which is really weird because ur xbt is an abbreviation the u and the name actually stands for unicode but when you go and do a test with you know some of these unicode cheat sheets you know i'll go to the internet and i'll grab a like a text file that's full of various weird unicode things and i'll run it through ursvt and like eighty percent of the stuff doesn't render correctly in ur xvt so i've gotta knock you know that's why they're in the med category the one thing i will say about you rxvt your xvt for performance as far as speed it has a daemon so you can actually run the urxvt daemon in the background that way when you have to bring up terminals they just kind of pop up immediately and that's really fast the downside of the daemon though is that everything is tied to the daemon all your terminals are tied to the ursbt demon meaning they're they're fast and pippy but if the daemon ever crashes all your terminal emulators also crash so that's the negative with that and i know i'm gonna get some hate in the comments below for putting both ur xvt and xterm in the med category because i know many people especially tiling window manager users and linux power users a lot of you guys ur xvt or xterm is probably your main terminal emulator and again i've used both as my main terminal emulator i've used urx vt as my terminal of choice for years before i switched to other things i used xterm as my terminal emulator of choice for a year or two at one point and they were again they're okay well they're not really okay because i put them in the med category but i i really think that i put up with a lot of things that i shouldn't have at the time i think a lot of people run these terminal emulators for the cool factor because they're kind of old school and but honestly everything above them is just a better terminal and last on my list is shock wake i did a video about yakwee a few months back and it's a kde terminal similar to console except this is your kde drop down terminal and for me even though it's kde it's essentially console as a drop down terminal a drop down terminal is you hit a hotkey and the terminal drops down from the top of the screen like halfway so you can do something and then you hit the hotkey to toggle it to go away you can think of drop down terminals as kind of like scratch pads and tiling window managers we have what are known as scratch pads where you hit a key binding to bring whatever program you have set to your scratch pad to pull up and then you hit the key binding again to toggle it to go away it doesn't close the program it just makes it go away until i hit the hot key to bring it back that's kind of what your drop down terminals are and y'all quake being console in drop down form you know i i'm gonna knock it for being a drop down terminal just because of functionality because i don't think most people are going to want that but as far as being a good terminal yet everything that console has the tabs and the preferences and all of that stuff yeah that works it's just the fact that it's a drop down terminal i wouldn't use it as my terminal emulator of choice especially as a tiling window manager user i don't think most people using tiling window managers would have a need for a drop down terminal at all the fact that we have scratch pads so those are the 12 terminal emulators that i was going to rank now i i could talk about a few others i haven't used them enough to where i feel real comfortable talking about them but some of the other ones i've used in the past i've used cute terminal the qt terminal cute terminal terminology i use sometimes when i'm looking at enlightenment distributions terminologies part of the enlightenment desktop environment there's also terminator which is a very popular terminal emulator that sometimes is installed by default on linux distributions that i take a look at but the only one i've used extensively enough to where i really would feel comfortable giving it any kind of ranking i mean cute terminal i've used enough let's go ahead and add cute terminal to the list down here uh cute terminal i'll put it in the okay category because honestly it's very similar to gnome terminal lx terminal xfce terminal yeah it's one of these okay terminals that has the built-in features you expect tabs and ligature and you set your color schemes and all that it's it's an okay terminal so there's my tier list for terminals let me know in the comments below what you agree with what you disagree with what would be in your great tier what would be in your yuck tear now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank dustin gabe james matt maxim michael mitchell paul west juan you bald homie allen armor dragon chuck commander record yokai dylan marstrom ariane alexander peace out from door polytechnic reality for less red prophet stephen tools devler and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this terminal emulator tier list would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to support me subscribe to distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace and be sure to leave a thank you to the guy that created this web app

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 95,955

Keywords: terminal emulator, linux terminal, best terminal emulator, command line, alacritty terminal, suckless terminal, linux terminal emulator, kitty terminal, linux tutorial, best linux terminal, open source, learn linux, urxvt, xterm, st terminal, gnome terminal, konsole, windows terminal, mac terminal, linux, gnu linux, free software, switch to linux, alacritty, xterm vs uxterm, terminal ligatures, terminal with tabs, distrotube, linux software

Id: 4YpQSY-vo5Q

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022