The best terminal emulator

copypaiste

copypaiste

Hi guys! :P

Please share your suggestions of best terminal emulator for Xorg.

Requirements are:
- tabs support,
- transparency,
- tunable hot keys,
- small and fast,
- unicode support.

Qt or GTK+ based are ok, as long as the installation doesn't requre having full KDE or Gnome installed.

My recent choices are x11-toolkits/sakura and x11/Terminal. But each one has it's flaws and both are far from ideal.
 
I've been using urxvt. I really like the tinted background and minimal scrollbar but I've got scrolling wrong somehow because it's slow and it leaves speckles everywhere but I can't figure out how to use a better font.
I just tried roxterm though and the default font is smooth and it scrolls fast but it doesn't have the tint or the nice scrollbar style. If you want to change fonts it has a GUI font selector which makes it easy and it has a zoom feature.
 
ROXterm (x11/roxterm) is nice but a resource hog (comparatively) and not much smaller than the gnome or KDE monsters. But then you've asked for gadgets like transparency.

I personally like x11/sakura. It's a good compromise of resource consumption and features, many of which I even don't care about.
For quick "flash up" jobs (like opening a term from the file manager) I like x11/evilvte but I do not usually recommend it because the port needs some hand tuning of config.h. Properly configured though even tiny x11/evilvte has many tricks up its sleeve like background images (sorry I can't tell much about those as I don't care for gadget candy).
 
I was a hardcore Konsole user in KDE 3.x. Tabbed browsing and the ability to split the screen and have 1 terminal typing into all the rest was awesome.

Unfortunately, Konsole in KDE 4.x lost a lot of the functionality of the older version, and didn't get tabs and split screen until recently.

I've since switched to Terminator on all my Linux and FreeBSD systems. Split screen and grouping really comes in handy.
 
x11/rxvt-unicode can be extended with Perl.

Want to highlight URLs (or any other text fragments) and open them on middle-click? Enable the matcher extension.

Want to be warned when pasting multiple lines? Enable the confirm-paste extension.

Tabbing and split screen is done by x11-wm/i3 or sysutils/tmux here, but there is an extension for this as well.

Edit: Plus no other terminal supports customizing line spacing AFAIK.
 
Trying roxterm and sakura they seem to look and behave alike but I'm told sakura is lighter. I like these two. They scroll and fast and no font problems.
I can't work out the terminator. I use my ALT-drag to re-size and it gets itself into a loop and diminishes in size until it just remains a flickering spot on the screen. Funny. Seems too complicated to me. Also seems to have additional chrome. I like to go border only.

I hate to admit it but the minimalist scroll bar on urxvt with the faded tinted transparent background makes me feel productive. I also colour code the tint, scroll bar and cursor on several terminals each with a different colour scheme as a mnemonic to it's purpose. Red terminal for root. Blue terminal for admin. Orange for that server /user, etc.
If anyone can tell me what settings I need to make urxvt scroll quicker and without speckles I'd be thankful. My .Xresources look like this amongst other things:
Code: 
URxvt.visualBell:   True
URxvt.jumpScroll:   True
URxvt.skipScroll:   True
URxvt.font:   -b&h-lucidatypewriter-bold-r-normal-sans-13-120-*-*-m-*-iso8859-10
URxvt.boldFont:   -b&h-lucidatypewriter-bold-r-normal-sans-13-120-*-*-m-*-iso8859-10
 
tobik said:
Want to highlight URLs (or any other text fragments) and open them on middle-click? Enable the matcher extension.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what's different about my config, but I can open URLs by simply clicking, without highlighting them first. Unless you mean "highlighting" as in "making URLs stand out." But yeah, my vote goes to x11/rxvt-unicode.
 
What about x11/tilda. It is an interesting terminal, and it has many of those specifications; it lacks tab support.

It allows you to configure it upon starting it the first time. Then to reconfigure it, erase or edit .tilda/ in the home folder.
 
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I have no idea why this slipped my mind, but nearly all of the features mentioned by the OP are available in nearly every terminal emulator out there, with the exception of tabs. So with that in mind, any currently maintained terminal emulator at all in conjunction with sysutils/tmux will do the trick. Transparency is also lacking in some terminals, but any window can be made transparent with a compositor like x11-wm/compton or x11-wm/xcompmgr. I don't use compositing myself, but I've been working in a Tmux session for the last few hours and didn't even think of it until now. :p
 
There's a way to make x11/tilda act like it uses tabbing, by keybinding the program to different F keys. It does the function, but it sometimes takes pushing the key twice. If I can set up its config file to make the program stay, without the F key making it disappear and reappear, it will just take 1 push to make it work.

I copied the configuration file sequentially, then had it bind it to F2 F3; then I had to start the program up three times through the desktop configuration file.

Also the directory may have to have write permissions removed for user, because it tends to keep wanting to make more configuration files on startup.
 
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FYI when using urxvt I've hit on some combinations of urxvt config that aren't too slow. Notably documentation advises don't tint and shade at the same time because it uses excessive resources. The lineSpace resource (option -lsp) helps with 'bad' fonts to stop screen speckles but can also make rendering slower.

I tried to use tint colours as advised without shading to get the faint tints I was looking for but I couldn't work out how other than using RGBA specifications with transparency settings. I don't know if this counts as tint and shade but it's quick enough now.

This is an example command line in my Fluxbox menu: urxvt -title blue -tint rgba:0000/2200/AA00/8888 -cr Blue -pr Blue -pr2 White -bd blue --scrollColor Blue and using this in ~/.Xresources:
Code: 
URxvt.visualBell:   True
# URxvt.skipScroll:   True
URxvt*jumpScroll: true
URxvt*scrollWithBuffer: true
URxvt*scrollTtyOutput: false
URxvt*scrollTtyKeypress: true
# URxvt*font: xft:Liberation Mono:pixelsize=13:antialias=true:hinting=true
# URxvt*boldFont: xft:Liberation Mono:bold:pixelsize=13:antialias=true:hinting=true
# URxvt*font: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:pixelsize=13:antialias=true:hinting=true
# URxvt*boldFont: xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:bold:pixelsize=13:antialias=true:hinting=true
URxvt*font: xft:DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Regular:pixelsize=13:antialias=true
URxvt*boldFont: xft:DejaVu Sans Mono:bold:pixelsize=13:antialias=true:hinting=true
URxvt.color4:   RoyalBlue
URxvt.color12:   RoyalBlue
URxvt.background:   Black
URxvt.foreground:   AntiqueWhite
URxvt.fadeColor:   black
URxvt.fading:   50
URxvt.tintColor:   rgba:ff00/dd00/0000/4444
URxvt.cursorColor:   Yellow
URxvt.pointerColor:   Yellow
URxvt.pointerColor2:   black
URxvt.borderColor:   Yellow
URxvt.scrollColor:   Yellow
URxvt.scrollstyle:   plain
URxvt.cursorBlink:   True
URxvt.borderLess:   True
URxvt.internalBorder:   2
URxvt.externalBorder:   0
URxvt.transparent:   True
URxvt.scrollBar:   True
URxvt.thickness:   1
 
In the config file, why do some lines have a "*" and others have a ".". I've edited my file to have a "." only
--
Also, x11/tilda didn't always start up cleanly after booting (rebuilding is an option). I've made urxvt replace it, to have a similar look and function as tilda.
 
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