Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

Apologies for the off-topic, but does anyone know a nice simple terminal emulator to use with tiling window managers such as i3? I'm using the xfce terminal right now, but that supports tabs which gets a little confusing since so does i3.

View on HN

I also recommend and use `urxvt`, but I would also add (and others haven't mentioned this) I use `urxvtd` and `urxvtc`. `urxvtd` is a daemon, and when you run `urxvtc` it spawns another urxvt 'client' off of the daemon. It results in a lot less memory usage and much quicker terminal start-ups. Doesn't matter tons if you already have a beefy system, but it helped tons on my older laptop that I used to use, and I've continued to use the feature since then.

I did this for awhile but occasionally (about daily) urxvtd would segfault and I'd lose all of my terminals. Never could figure out why :(

Huh, that's pretty bad, I can't blame you for not using it anymore. I've personally never had it segfault and I've been using it for years now, so it's hard to say what was happening there.

I just use gnome-terminal. It is fine. No chrome or trim. i3 and tmux to lay out terminals. If you don't like tmux, i3 is also very good at laying things out. Just turn off all the menus for something like gnome-terminal, which renders things like powerline fonts fine.

I'll check it out. Thanks. It does seem similar to xfce4-terminal with it also supporting tabs. Perhaps I should just unbind those shortcuts.

I also use gnome-terminal with i3, works great.

I just use termite, it's super simple with no tabs or anything, and you can hack it so that it shows up as a floating window (for quick commands) or as a regular window, and have multiple terminals tiled.

Urxvt seems to be a popular choice among i3 users. I'd recommend checking Reddit (r/unixporn) for some example screenshots showing various configurations common to i3 users.

Not an i3 user, but xmonad should be close enough. I'm using termite nowadays. It's configured by editing a plain text file in your editor of choice (as opposed to a GUI), it does not have buttons that take away space, and the vim-like visual mode is a game changer for me. The only annoying thing is that it sets TERM=xterm-termite, which machines you log in via ssh usually don't recognize because termite is not installed there. Easily fixed in your .bashrc.

The creators of i3wm provide a hint as to what they think might serve as good terminal implementations for i3 on their manual page[1]. Here's how the search sequence begins for a "sensible terminal": $TERMINAL urxvt rxvt termit terminator...

[1] http://build.i3wm.org/docs/i3-sensible-terminal.html

Note that the order in this script is undefined. We started with the terminal emulators we knew about and accepted all PRs which added others. The current order should not be mistaken for fitness or judgement :).

I've had good luck with Sakura (it's possible to turn off all chrome if you want):

http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura

[ed: That said, I now notice that Tilix appears to be written in D, which should point to it avoiding a few C/C++ pitfalls. ]

I use urxvt with xmonad (another tiling WM). I love it, it's so minimalist and basic. I think it supports tabs with a perl extension but by default it has no fancy functionality that your WM can provide for you.

alacritty is an absolutely barebones terminal emulator, no tabs, configuration through a flat file etc. It's main 'selling point' is that it paints through the GPU.

Load up tmux in xfce terminal? Will give you persistance also

I actually don't want any tiling to be done on the terminal level. I want to use my tiling window manager to tile multiple terminals, so I can move a tile between workspaces, monitors, etc.

The "problem" I'm having with the xfce terminal is that it supports tabs. It basically has too much features for me. And being the idiot that I am, I make use of them. Even though I'd actually prefer not to, so that instead I'll be using the features provided by my window manager.

It's a silly problem, I know. But the question is:

What is a performant customizable terminal that is dead simple? No tabs. No tiles. Just a single terminal window.

Or maybe I should just unbind the create new tab shortcut.

Evilvte is small and configurable in the source code, you can easily compile it without tabs.

And it's dead. For something dead simple, you can also write your own terminal (based on libvte, like many existing terminals): https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2017-write-own-terminal.

I have been using Alacritty for a couple of weeks now, it seems to match your wishes: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

Does it have backscroll yet? Without that it's kind of the wrong way around in what features it lacks.

Like, People who want to run every session in tmux (but don't care about using a tiling wm) don't need scrolling, tabs, or splits. People who want to run their terminals in i3 also don't want tabs or splits, but they do need scroll or else they have to duplicate effort on both sides just to get scrolling.

Here is the pull request for scroolback, it is still open:

https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/657

https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology

I suggest guake terminal. You may spawn it in every i3 tab you're currently in. Combine with tmux or screen for maximum worlflow

termite

https://github.com/thestinger/termite https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/termite

What’s wrong with xterm?

mlterm. Idiosyncratic configuration, but hands down the best for vim users because it has a solution for the alt-8bit/escape-timeout problem.

I use urxvt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com