The best terminal emulator

All these terminal emulators dazzle me. Most of the mentioned features don't come to mind with me when using rather plain x11/xterm or rxvt-unicode. Transparency or tabs I don't need, config in a text file is just fine. IMHO it's just eye candy, and my box has a minimum of that using x11-wm/cwm.

Anyhow TNX for all the reviews, they confirm my use for myself.
 
I'm with the xterm and rxvt-unicode crowd. If one "must" have tabs, mrxt .
But I'm a simple man. Email is text, term windows are text and should be easy on the eyes.
Manage my windows but don't give me all the spinny flashy transparent stuff.
lxterminal/lxterm (the lxde version of xterm, with tabs) is ok.
 
John Call said:
Damn, and I'm just a xterm pleb. I feel my unworthiness before the gods. They know how filthy I am.

Can someone sell me on any of these fancy schmancy terminal emulators? What features am I missing?
Click to expand...
Nothing. Any terminal that can't produce an SVG screen dump (xterm: Main Options -> SVG Screen Dump, or CSI 1 1 i = printf '\033[11i') is not a terminal.
 
meine said:
Most of the mentioned features don't come to mind with me when using rather plain x11/xterm or rxvt-unicode. Transparency or tabs I don't need, config in a text file is just fine. IMHO it's just eye candy, and my box has a minimum of that using x11-wm/cwm.
Click to expand...
I was a x11/rxvt-unicode guy for a long time until I face those bugs:
So I went back to x11/xterm which I still use currently waiting patiently for rxvt's fixes.

Like you I just need a not complicated terminal that can play nicely for my usage on a very simple x11-wm/i3 desktop, when said like that it sounds easy to accomplish but it can be kind of a quest sometimes.
x11/alacritty, x11/kitty, x11/rio I am not a fan of these because there is always something I miss or I do not want, and full windowed terminal like x11/terminator, x11/qterminal don't play well with tiling window manager.
One day I may give a try to x11/sterm once I'll figure out few things about it.

Having said that it worth noting that if I would be on, let say MATE or XFCE, I would certainly stick with x11/mate-terminal or x11/xfce4-terminal because that's the default terminal and it works OTB.
 
x11/jbxvt is very lightweight, and it's mostly in libxcb, it's not purely in that, as it has an libx include and dependencies. The problem with it, is it's buggy and causes crashes.

I use x11/xvt now. It's lighter than xterm and stable. One issue is that some characters don't display properly, including in ncurses configuration screens.

x11/xterm is standard, but is sort of RAM intensive.

I liked the transparency and Unicode support of x11/rxvt-unicode. I haven't been able to use transparency on it for a long time, and I'm unsure if that feature has been removed.

Comparison of RAM usage on my computer from a few months ago:
[TABLE=collapse]
[TR]
[TH]Command[/TH]
[TH]Size[/TH]
[TH]Res[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]xterm[/TD]
[TD]27M[/TD]
[TD]16M[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]st[/TD]
[TD]22M[/TD]
[TD]10M[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]xvt[/TD]
[TD]18M[/TD]
[TD]5.5M[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]jbxvt[/TD]
[TD]13M[/TD]
[TD]2.3M[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
 
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John Call said:
Damn, and I'm just a xterm pleb. I feel my unworthiness before the gods. They know how filthy I am.

Can someone sell me on any of these fancy schmancy terminal emulators? What features am I missing?
Click to expand...
XTerm is a perfectly good terminal emulator. Though it doesn't support tabs like gnome-terminal or mate-terminal (my goto), it's still an old favourite because it's much more configurable than any other. It can overcome problems terminal emulators that rely on GPU support in a VMware or virtualbox environment may suffer, because it doesn't use the GPU. If you understand how to use .Xresources (.Xdefaults), you can configure XTerm in a similar fashion as {gnome,mate}-terminal, without the tabs of course.

screen(1) or tmux(1) can easily overcome the lack of tab support.
 
cy@ said:
XTerm is a perfectly good terminal emulator. Though it doesn't support tabs like gnome-terminal or mate-terminal (my goto), it's still an old favourite because it's much more configurable than any other. It can overcome problems terminal emulators that rely on GPU support in a VMware or virtualbox environment may suffer, because it doesn't use the GPU. If you understand how to use .Xresources (.Xdefaults), you can configure XTerm in a similar fashion as {gnome,mate}-terminal, without the tabs of course.
Click to expand...
I don't have either an .Xresources or .Xdefaults and don't really know how to get started....

After watching a few videos about x11/xterm

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAUQsNUnk9I


I think I need to do some configuration to make Xterm more usable.

cy@ said:
screen(1) or tmux(1) can easily overcome the lack of tab support.
Click to expand...
Only just finding out about sysutils/tmux. Looks like I've been missing out on quite a bit...
 
.Xresources (.Xdefaults) is old-school. Modern GUIs use graphical interface to manage settings, which are normally placed in your .config directory.

Legacy X apps include resource files which are stored in ${LOCALBASE}/X11/app-defaults. You can override these resources by putting them in y our .Xresources or .Xdefaults file. (I link one to the other).

My Xterm resources are below. People might ask, but why list the defaults. CDE changes the XTerm background colour and the font. I prefer the smaller terminal. You will also see I change the character class so that XTerm cut & paste behaves just like gnome-terminal or mate-terminal. (#if 0 and #if 1 are reminders to me, the human.)

I include .Xresources in my CDE resources file -- yeah you can "nest" them.

Code: 
!
! XTerm resources
!
! xterm*font is case sensitive because CDE now defaults to much larger fonts
! as it did on Tru64. I like the smaller font for xterm.
xterm*font:    fixed
XTerm*font:    fixed
! rest of XTerm resources
XTerm*VT100*font:    fixed
XTerm*VT100*deleteIsDEL:    true
#ifdef COLOR
XTerm*customization:    -color
! XTerm*Background:        White
#endif
#if 0
XTerm*Foreground:        White
XTerm*Background:        Black
XTerm*cursorColor:    White
XTerm*pointerColor:    White
XTerm*borderColor:    White
!XTerm*ReverseVideo:    false
#endif
#if 0
XTerm*Foreground:    Black
XTerm*Background:    White
XTerm*cursorColor:    Black
XTerm*pointerColor:    Black
XTerm*borderColor:    Black
XTerm*ReverseVideo:    true
#endif
#if 1
XTerm*Foreground:    White
XTerm*Background:    Black
XTerm*cursorColor:    White
XTerm*pointerColor:    White
XTerm*borderColor:    White
XTerm*ReverseVideo:    false
#endif
XTerm*jumpScroll:    true
XTerm*fastScroll:    true
XTerm*scrollBar:    true
XTerm*saveLines:    1024
XTerm*scrollBar*Cursor:        sb_v_double_arrow
XTerm*ScrollBar*cursorName:    sb_v_double_arrow
XTerm*reverseWrap:    true
! XTerm*activeIcon:        true
! XTerm*selectToClipboard:    true
XTerm*loginShell:    true
! XTerm*charClass:    33:48,37:48,45-47:48,38:48
! XTerm*charClass:    33:48,37:48,45-47:48,38:48,64:48
XTerm*charClass:    33:48,37:48,45-47:48,38:48,64:48,58:48
 
cy@ Good stuff thanks. I do much the same. The symlink is a good trick, I also do similar with .xsession and .xinitrc. I think most graphical logins like xdm or gdm use .xsession while .xinitrc is used by startx.
 
I wanted to test rxvt because acording to wikipedia it is intended to be a slimmed-down alternate for xterm.
Then I did:

root@fbsd% pkg install rxvt-unicode
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 14 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

Installed packages to be REMOVED:
ImageMagick6: 6.9.12.77_2,1
synfig: 1.4.4_1
synfigstudio: 1.4.4_2

New packages to be INSTALLED:
libptytty: 2.0
rxvt-unicode: 9.31

Installed packages to be UPGRADED:
inn: 2.7.0_1 -> 2.7.1_1
p5-GD: 2.76 -> 2.78

perl5: 5.32.1_3 -> 5.34.3_3


Installed packages to be REINSTALLED:
p5-Clone-0.46 (direct dependency changed: perl5)
p5-GSSAPI-0.28_2 (direct dependency changed: perl5)
p5-HTML-Parser-3.81 (direct dependency changed: perl5)
p5-Locale-libintl-1.33 (direct dependency changed: perl5)
p5-Net-SSLeay-1.92 (direct dependency changed: perl5)
p5-Socket6-0.29 (direct dependency changed: perl5)

Number of packages to be removed: 3
Number of packages to be installed: 2
Number of packages to be upgraded: 3
Number of packages to be reinstalled: 6

The operation will free 48 MiB.
18 MiB to be downloaded.

Proceed with this action? [y/N]: N
Click to expand...

No, thanks! I stay with xterm.
 
If you make changes to .Xresources, you need to run "xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources" for it to take effect.
You may need to edit the XTerm*Foreground XTerm*Background lines, my system didn't like "Foreground" but like "foreground" similar with Background (capitalization)
 
sidetone said:
I liked the transparency and Unicode support of x11/rxvt-unicode. I haven't been able to use transparency on it for a long time, and I'm unsure if that feature has been removed.

[TABLE=collapse]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
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Click to expand...
It's still available, You just need a window manager that supports compositing for "true transparency".
e.g.
Code: 
  URxvt.background:                           [90]#0a0b15
If you don't need true transparency, or if compositing uses too many resources, transparency can be obtained this way:
Code: 
URxvt*inheritPixmap: true
URxvt*transparent: true
URxvt.background: [85]#000000
URxvt.tintColor:     black
 
To help find the names that go with .Xresources and/or .Xdefaults for configuring them, run xprop and click on the window, to see the properties of. In addition, a softlink from .Xdefaults to .Xresources makes configuration a little more simple.

xprop(1) with grep(1) is useful. Look for the WM_ and/or CLASS line. This helps a lot, because otherwise, you're guessing on the name and letter case, or having to look each one up and seeing what sticks.
 
Both x11/rxvt-unicode and x11/xterm have transparency. rxvt-unicode is the "main" terminal and xterm merely a backup terminal. Even if I'm using a window manager (x11-wm/i3) I like tabs. So my rxvt-unicode has tabs (tabbedex) which can be manually renamed and this way I don't have to use tmux or gnu screen. Lately I've started coqueting with x11/kitty but since it lack a few things or at least, did not manage to find/config them rxvt-unicode is still THE ONE.

i3wm0.png
 
copypaiste said:
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.
Click to expand...
I use x11/yakuake and x11/guake. Both are great, but I like the former one iota more.
 
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