Top 5 Terminal Emulators

[Music] hello and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video what i'm going to do is go over my top five favorite terminal emulators for the linux desktop and actually a few of them are across platform as well so even you mac and windows users out there will be happy with some of the selections on my list but i wanted to give you guys a list of my favorite terminal emulators because well it's something that i get asked every now and then which terminal emulator should i use and i have five of them in this video for you to consider now this is not an extensive list of all the terminal emulators that are available for the linux desktop i mean obviously there's more than five there's all kinds of different terminal emulators available but these are my five personal favorite terminal emulators that i recommend that you consider now i made sure to not include any terminal emulator on this list that constitutes a default terminal emulator for a desktop for example the mate terminal gnome terminal console and so on i made sure not to include those you've probably already used one of those terminals anyway i wanted to focus on the optional terminals that you can install so that's what i'm going to do in this video now before i get into that though i want to take a moment to mention the sponsor for today's video lenode and lynode has been a sponsor of learn linux tv for quite some time now and that makes sense this is a linux youtube channel and lenode is a cloud server provider that specializes in linux and they have all kinds of distributions available there so you can get your very own linux server set up and ready to go in minutes and you could get that server for as low as five dollars a month and the pricing is very straightforward you can spin up a linux server to start your very own blog maybe your very own next cloud server or maybe you can use leno to spin up your very own test server that you can use while you're going over any of the tutorial videos that are available on learn linux tv they have all kinds of really cool features such as kubernetes block storage object storage dns and so on the feature set is amazing the dashboard is very easy to use and i highly recommend that you check them out to get your very own account and by using the url that you see on the screen right now you can start your very own account with 100 in free credit that's good for up to 60 days and there's all kinds of linux that you could fit within that credit definitely check out lenode and i really appreciate their continued sponsorship of learn linux tv now let's go ahead and dive into my list of my top five terminal emulators and let's start with number one and these are not in order of preference by the way but the first one that i'm going to start with is tilex and i already have it installed in fact i've installed all of these already on my laptop so i'll bring it up right now and here's tilex and all its glory so at first it might not look like much but i promise you this one is really cool you'll notice that we have several buttons up here at the top of the window and when i click on some of these buttons you'll see immediately why i like it so much so for example i just created a horizontal split right here i can also do the same with a vertical split and i could resize them as well but that's not all up here we have a list of sessions and of course we start with one if i click the plus icon here i'm going to get additional terminals that share the same window and i can switch between them by selecting them right from the drop down so for example maybe right here i have h-top running and there it is and i'll switch over here to the first terminal and maybe i have a job running or some kind of task that i'm working on in this terminal and then whenever i want to switch over to h-top i have it running right here that's pretty cool so as you can see we can switch through the different sessions we can create splits we can resize them and we can also close them as well so we have a lot of flexibility here with tilex and we also have some keyboard shortcuts as well so what i'm going to do is just go ahead and just kill these other terminals here now we're down to one and i'll get rid of this one as well so some of the keyboard shortcuts that i would like to share with you for tilex if this is something that you want to check out you could do ctrl shift t and that actually creates another terminal notice right here that we have another terminal in the list so if i hold ctrl and shift to press t again i have three and now i have a bunch i have seven terminals open and i can open them with that keyboard shortcut now what if i want a new window altogether i can get a brand new window by holding shift and control which is actually the case for most of these shortcuts and then i could do end for new and i have a new window to work with now as cool as it is to open up a new window the main benefit of tilex is that you have all of your windows underneath this menu right here on the left hand side which is just so cool now speaking of different terminals you can also switch between the terminals that are shown right here in this menu with a keyboard shortcut as well and i like this because i don't like to use the mouse unless i absolutely have to we can hold ctrl and press page up to go up and notice on the top left the number increases and decreases so i hold ctrl press page down and page up so for example i have htop running right here i don't know why i keep using that as an example but i do and then i'll hold ctrl and press page down i go to terminal number two and then i hold ctrl and press page up to go back to the first terminal now ctrl alt r that gives me a vertical split and then ctrl alt d gives me a horizontal split in that same window so technically that's adding a new terminal down so d is down control alt down and then control alt r is new terminal right so for example if i hold ctrl and alt and press r right here i get a new terminal on the right hand side of where i'm at now if i move my cursor all the way over here to the first one and then i do ctrl alt r notice that my new terminal shows up right here so when you hold ctrl and alt and press r you're getting a new terminal to the right of where you currently are where your cursor is blinking that's where you are so that'll help you determine where the terminal is going to end up when you hold ctrl alt and press r or d to get a new split but to move between the splits you can simply click on one and notice how we have an outline of a cursor in an inactive window and then in an active window the cursor is blinking it doesn't always blink or it blinks for a little bit and then it stops but we do have a full cursor right here it's not an outline that's how we know which terminal we're actually inside of and then to switch between them without using the mouse i could hold alt and then press any of the arrow keys so for example left right down up left right down you get the idea if you hold down shift and alt and then press an arrow key you actually start changing the size of the individual split that's pretty cool so it's pretty cool that you could resize these splits without reaching for your mouse in fact there's all kinds of keyboard shortcuts here that i can't go over in one video but what you could do is actually view all of the keyboard shortcuts and this wasn't actually set up by default but i added this keyboard shortcut myself control super and then v and we get this really awesome window right here that gives us a list of the common keyboard shortcuts in tilex now what i did actually get that list is i customized this so i went over here and then i went to preferences we have shortcuts right here and then we have view configured shortcuts and i set that to control super v on your end you can set that to whatever you'd like some distributions might already have a keyboard shortcut that's using that so you may or may not want to use the same keyboard shortcut as i'm using but the point is you could go ahead and set a keyboard shortcut that gives you a list of all the other keyboard shortcuts which will definitely help you remember it now tilex as you can see is pretty awesome but there's some downsides as well i want to make sure that i give you guys the pros and the cons of each inside this video and one of the cons of tilex is that it's actually kind of heavyweight now don't get me wrong it's not going to saturate your ram it's not google chrome or anything like that but it is going to be a heavier terminal than most so i would recommend tilex for people that either have a lot of ram or maybe you're using a desktop environment like gnome or something like that maybe even cinnamon i feel like this terminal will fit in quite well in those desktop environments especially because gnome for example they already have header bars here in the title bar so it fits right in now if you're more of a fan of lighter weight terminals i have some other selections in this list that'll cater to you guys but tilex is just not going to be a good fit for someone that wants something small and light so let's go ahead and close out of here and we'll check out my next selection which is actually going to be similar to tilex but it's going to be lighter when it comes to resource usage and the next one on my list is going to be terminator and here it is in all its glory this is terminator now it might look a little strange at first if you haven't seen it before but it's actually a really cool terminal emulator with a lot of customization options now i mentioned that terminator is actually similar to tilex but what exactly did i mean by that well one of the similarities between tilex and terminator is the fact that you can have horizontal and vertical splits and this is just one of those things that i think is just so cool so i'll make this bigger and i'll show you exactly what i'm talking about so what i could do is right click anywhere in this terminal window here and i could split horizontally i could split vertically as you can see and then i could click on each individual pane to move my cursor into that pane so now i'm right here and now i'm right here and also like tilex you can hold alt and then press an arrow key and that will help you switch the currently active pane notice that the red title bar follows the cursor so in one way it's a little bit easier to tell which one currently has focus because you have that red bar that just well totally stands out and we can also resize a pane with the keyboard as well so if you hold shift and control and while you're holding those down you press an arrow key you can see that i'm actually able to resize the individual panes so i can make one larger than another and that'll help me make better use of my screen real estate and we can also customize terminator as well so if i right click anywhere here and then go down to preferences as you can see here we can go to profiles we could change the font we could change the colors so we have all kinds of different options here for how to customize terminator and you know what terminator is just plain awesome this is probably the terminal emulator that i use the most but i do like all of the ones on this list now as far as downsides terminator doesn't really have many downsides i mean one downside potentially is that it's not the most lightweight terminal emulator on this list but it's not going to be as heavy as tilex and don't get me wrong like i mentioned tilex isn't google chrome it's not going to saturate your ram but you know some people really love lightweight and tiny terminal emulators and while terminator is definitely smaller than tilex it's not the smallest on this list so what i'm going to do is just close out of this and we'll check out the next selection on my list now the next terminal emulator number three in my list is alacrity and i really hope i'm saying that right i'm not 100 sure but what i'll do is i'll bring it up and i will show you now at first it might not look like much i mean nothing happens when i right click here i have this very small window so this is really simple but what exactly sets alacrity apart from other terminal emulators so one of the benefits of alacrity is that it's actually gpu accelerated but should make it a lot smoother than other terminal emulators but that's not even the coolest part in my opinion what i really like about this terminal emulator besides the fact that it's smooth and it works well is that it's cross-platform now here i am on a popos installation that's what i'm running here on my laptop but you can also run this on your mac if you happen to have one as well as your windows pc if you have that now what i'm going to do is just make this a little bit bigger and i will show you how to customize this because earlier i mentioned there's no right-click menu so how exactly do you customize this particular terminal well if i go into my.config folder and then i have an alacrity folder inside there you'll notice that i have this config file right here that i've renamed with a bak extension but this is actually the config file that we want to edit right here so what i'm going to do is just move this over to the original name so now that i've named that file properly if i reopen the terminal we can see that my window is bigger that was one of the settings that i've changed i've customized the font size as well i also added a bit of transparency so if i open a file manager window and then i'll just go ahead and move this terminal above it you can kind of see the application behind the window through the window because you could customize transparency as well in fact every terminal emulator on my list does indeed give you the ability to customize transparency in some form or fashion so this feature isn't unique to alacrity it's just something that i like to do and i was able to do that by customizing the config file that i have saved in my config folder inside alacrity and again there it is if i open it up you can see that we have all the customization here almost everything is commented out but it's just giving you some examples of some of the things that you can customize and as you can see there's a lot of things here that you can customize so i really like that a lot and also i really like the fact that it uses a yaml file for configuration and this makes it very easy to create a config file that you like save it and then you could copy that config file to all of your computers so that alacrity will behave the exact same way on each machine personally i find it easier to customize a config file than a gui config editor because again it makes it a lot easier to grab the config file and then drop it on whatever machine you want to have the same config it's just my preferred way to do it but the thing is though this config file doesn't actually exist by default and it's not going to be created when you open this terminal for the very first time so to grab the default config file what you do is you just open up a browser and i'll have a link to this down in the description below this video but what you want to do is navigate to github.com and then slash alacrity then slash alacrity again and that brings you to the default github page for this project which is really cool i mean it's open source that's awesome but if you scroll down and then you click on the github releases page you'll have a list of releases here that you can download from so i guess if you're curious how do i install this well that's one way you can do it but specifically what i want to draw your attention to is the presence of the alacrity yaml file right here so it's a good idea to grab the config file here from the releases page because if it ever changes in the future with a newer version of this emulator you could grab a matching yaml file so that way you could take advantage of any new features they might have added and it's going to download it so you save it and then what you do after you save the file is you create the alacrity folder underneath dot config you drop it in there and then you open it up in a text editor and you go ahead and customize it you can see some of the customizations that i've made right here so under the window section i had to uncomment that and then i went ahead and added these values to determine the starting window size so that'll actually determine how big the initial window is before i do anything at all so if i bring it back up again and that's actually overly large so that's actually not as big as i want it but anyway my point is you could go ahead and customize it here alacrity is really awesome i recommend you check it out we have the config file right here so if you want to play around with that you can do so you know for example adding transparency you get the idea and then save this config file somewhere and then you have a master config file that you can use to get your defaults back i think that's awesome now the main downside for alacrity is that although it's really awesome i mean you may or may not want to customize a config file like i'm doing right here i mean even though i like it personally not everyone is going to prefer that in particular maybe you actually prefer a gui config editor there's nothing wrong with that but this could be a little annoying sometimes because you have to have the spacing just right it is a yaml file after all and if you don't have everything spaced correctly then it's just not going to read anything at all whatsoever so it does require a bit of customization and spending some time on tweaking things but if you don't mind that then alacrity is actually really cool so the next one in my list is actually called kitty this is it right here that's the actual name and as you can see the default customization here in my case i mean the text is very small i could barely read that but it's very easy to change the customization we'll get to that in a moment now like alacrity kitty is actually gpu accelerated as well so if that's a feature that you really want to take advantage of then you have two options within my list now alacrity and kitty are actually kind of rivals i don't really prefer one over the other because they're both awesome and there's all kinds of debate out there about which one is superior i recommend you check out both and then make a decision for yourself but one thing i definitely like about this is that you can open the config file right from the terminal itself without having to manually find the file and edit it so for example ctrl shift and then f2 that brings up the config file now already we see that the font size is teensy so you're not going to be able to see this so we need to fix that font size let's see how we can do that so what i'll do is search for the word font and it's really cool that it supports vim shortcuts so muscle memory works for me right here and i'm going to search for every occurrence where is the font size and here it is right here so let's go ahead and bump this up i'm just going to make it ridiculous i will change it to i don't know 24 that's probably going to make it huge but that's what i'll set it to so i'll save it just like we do in vim colon w enter then colonqueue to quit out so what i'm going to do is just exit out bring it back up and we have a larger font size so i guess a font size of 24 wasn't as big as i thought it was going to be this is a high dpi laptop so obviously all the font sizes are going to be small by default but you get the idea i was able to customize the font size and that worked out well for me now in this case we also have the config file over here in the dot config directory and then we go into the kitty folder inside there i have kitty.com.back that's the one that i was playing around with before i started recording so what i'll do is just move that over to the original name to replace that file so now we only have that one so i'll bring it back up and here we have my custom configuration for kitty you may or may not be able to see the fact that i have transparency enabled so i'll just open up a file manager window yet again and you can see that we have some awesome transparency here that is just so cool and i was able to customize this by just simply editing that config file changing a couple of values and i'm good to go but that's not the only thing that i like about kitty we also have some additional features as well that are really cool let's go ahead and check it out now if i hold ctrl and shift and press enter check this out i get a horizontal split like you see right here ctrl shift t that gives me a new tab we can see the tabs actually show up down here and they look kind of cool actually look at this i mean this is a very unique way to show tabs so that's really cool let's go ahead and close these i'm just going to hold ctrl and press d to get out of those and i'll open up a few new splits so as you can see i have four splits right here now another thing that we could do in this terminal emulator is we can hold shift and control and then press l and when we do that the layout mode actually changes into one of several variations so in this case i'm actually zoomed into one terminal in particular and it'll probably become more apparent if i run something like h top in this window so that way you can see kind of how it moves around so now it's full screen ctrl shift l and i'm going to keep pressing it and then you can see the different layouts that are available so as you can see kitty is very awesome and i highly recommend that you check it out as far as downsides are concerned i think that the customization can be daunting to someone who really doesn't want to spend a lot of time customizing the terminal but in addition to that i really don't like the way that it handles splits i think that terminator and tilex really have that nailed down but here we have the ability to open a new terminal and depending on which layout you're in that determines how that particular new terminal is laid out on the screen and then you switch with control shift and l like i mentioned and that might be okay for some of you but that's really the only downside for me now don't get me wrong there's all kinds of customization options when it comes to kitty so of course you could go ahead and change the configuration and change the way that this terminal behaves and that'll help you make it your own but as long as you don't mind spending some time tweaking this and customizing it i think kitty is awesome now the last one on my list is perhaps the lightest weight of all of them and that is rxvt unicode and when i say tiny this one is very tiny so i'll go ahead and launch it and when i say tiny i wasn't kidding was i this window is minuscule and the font is so small i can't even read it so already it really doesn't look like rxbt unicode is any good at all because if you can't read it well how useful could it be but don't let that fool you once you customize rxvt and make it your own it definitely looks a lot better than it does right now so what i'm going to do is open another terminal because this one is so small i can't even see what the heck i'm doing so what i'll do is just open up tilex yet again and i'll close this out right here i have a hidden file right here called xresources.old and what i'm going to do is i'm going to overwrite the x resources file itself and then what i'll do is type xrdb i want to reload the configuration for the x resources file so i'll just go ahead and tell it to find the file and there it is so exit this and let's go ahead and open up rxvt yet again and see how different it looked from the first time i opened it up and check it out it definitely looks a lot better than it did before in my opinion and like i mentioned rxvt is a very lightweight terminal so if you want to make sure you get your ram usage as low as you possibly can and it kind of makes sense i mean why should your terminal use up all of your ram your browser is bad enough then rxvt is a great fit but the configuration can be a little bit daunting and perhaps more complicated than anything else that i've mentioned on this list because you have to know how to edit an x resources file in order to make this look sane in my opinion and also as you just saw the default configuration is practically unusable even on a 1080p screen that's going to be way too small to read so you'll definitely need to customize this in order to use it on a regular basis and again you do that by editing the dot x resources file and we have mine right here i only have five lines in this particular file and the lines that i have here actually control the window geometry how big the window is the font size i like to hide the scroll bar by default i made the background black and the foreground white as you can see but there's all kinds of different options that you can configure i think the best way to do this is to look at other people's configs i mean you can look at them in github you can google this and you can find individual lines that you might want to add to this file that'll help you make it your own so if you don't mind spending some time learning the customization and copying and pasting values into this file and testing it out then rxvt unicode is really awesome like i mentioned it's lightweight and since we have a config file that we can edit you could drop that config file on any of our other machines and well you're going to get the same config so if you're a fan of lightweight terminal emulators then rxvt unicode is definitely the way to go so there you have it let me know in the comments down below if i missed anything like a really awesome terminal emulator that should have been on my list and maybe you guys will let me know about something awesome that i didn't even know about so put your comments down there in the comments section i look forward to hearing what you guys have to say and be sure to subscribe if you haven't already done so i have some awesome content coming very soon but in the meantime thank you so much for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Learn Linux TV

Views: 74,755

Keywords: Linux, Review, Learn Linux, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, alacritty, kitty terminal, shell, bash, devops, tools, utilities, tilix, terminator, rxvt, rxvt-unicode, linux terminal, terminal app, macos terminal, terminal emulator, best terminal emulator, command line, gnu/linux (operating system), fastest terminal emulator, terminal emulators, linux terminal emulator, linux terminal apps, best terminal emulator linux, best terminal emulator 2022, linux terminal emulators

Id: aCIph71bBic

Length: 27min 1sec (1621 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022