What's a good Linux terminal emulator that doesn't try to reinvent TMUX? | Hacker News Reader

What's a good Linux terminal emulator that doesn't try to reinvent TMUX?

25 pointsswidi55 comments

I don't need tabs, or sessions, or startup scripts or even mouse support. I just need a terminal with good colour support and fast performance, without any of the bells and whistles that are utterly wasted on TMUX users.

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Alacritty is simple and fast[0] (it does have mouse support, but no tabs, sessions, or startup scripts as far as I know. Configuration is all via config file.).

Is that the kind of thing that you were looking for?

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

Regarding terminal emulators, I believe that by "fast" people usually mean "low latency" instead of "high throughput". Apparently alacritty has a good performance on thoughtput according its benchmark with vtebench, but it does not provide good latency performance according to [0].

[0] https://danluu.com/term-latency/

I agree, 34ms is unacceptable latency. Let's all use eshell in Emacs instead.

That reference is pretty old at this point, especially considering that some of those terminal emulators were very young projects still. I would search for new results before making a statement about performance.

I'm not sure how current that article is - in that article they state that the alacritty team had created an issue relating to latency[0] which was closed in favour of a different issue[1] which is still open.

The newer issue[1] appears to state that latency isn't an issue on Wayland as it already has frame scheduling support, but their proposed fix targets X11, MacOS and Windows.

I was quite surprised as I hadn't noticed any latency using alacritty, but I've been on Wayland for some time so that might be the reason.

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/673

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3972

Doesn't it feel sketchy to run a terminal that isn't even packaged by Debian? I run a few non-packaged things, but I don't want my terminal, or shell, or kernel to be "some code from a some person on github".

Idk man, this is a successful project that's half a decade old[1], has over 40k stars, is wildly popular in eg. the UnixPorn and TWM communities, and is packaged by most other distros; I don't really see any cause for concern ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1]: Dated via the dev's release blog post: https://jwilm.io/blog/announcing-alacritty/

twm the windowmanager?

That's strange. I wonder why debian is lagging behind on packaging it? Alacritty is packaged by my package manager, so I never really thought about it much.

In addition, at some point I had a look, and the former terminal I used to use (termite[0]) deprecated itself in favour of alacritty as well so I can't even switch back (I mean I could, but it's now unmaintained.)

[0] https://github.com/thestinger/termite

I don't see how that is a property of a software. If it isn't in the repos of a distro, it is a property of the distro.

As you got systemd and non systemd distros, Debian is in this a distro w/o alacrity.

No, not being included in Debian reflects poorly on the software. It implies there's something "wrong" with it. Perhaps it's too new, or too arcane, or in some other fashion doesn't live up to the operating system's extremely high quality and security standards.

I don't think this would necessarily be true with other Linux based operating systems (perhaps RHEL), but certainly is true in this case.

OP mentioned good colour support, which alacritty does not have.

How do you mean? I always thought the colours seem fine, and googling this it says it has 24-bit colour support[0] which almost seems excessive for a terminal. Are there some limitations or problems I'm unaware of?

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Colors

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/109

Maybe I'm a bit harsh, but you see a lot of programs require work arounds.

I enjoy Kitty’s good color support and performance, though it does have a lot of bells and whistles in which you’re not interested:

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

I use urxvtd and LOVE it. It's blissfully fast with a smaller memory footprint than anything else I've tried.

edit: I should have mentioned, having the minimal overhead and most responsive terminal is a "tier 1" priority for me.

Urxvtd is the fastest, and lightest weight terminal period.

Either that, or something has changed since I spent a long time picking it.

And the name just rolls off the tongue!

xterm: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/

I used to use

xterm -fn r24 &

to get a larger font on some Unix and IIRC Linux systems a while ago. Good memories of doing a lot of fun command-line stuff, including Unix command usage, writing shell scripts a la the examples in The Unix Programming Environment book, and also writing many command-line utilities in C, and later, in Python ... :)

Why colour support. As a tmux user, I never use it. It's utterly wasted. But seriously, here is one option.

Tmux is a BSD project. On NetBSD, it replaced window(1), which was quite basic and did not have GNU screen or tmux bells and whistles. Thus, to avoid such features, one could use window:

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/distfiles/window-20120215....

Linux users can use pkgsrc to compile it.

The expression "doesn't try to reinvent" may suggest that the desired alternative needs to have been written after tmux, not before. If so, then window will not qualify. It dates back to the 1990s, at least.

Footnote - I admire the minimalism sought here. I consider myself somewhat of a minimalist and the size of tmux has never bothered me. Looking at the source, it is relatively easy to remove features. I have not used a mouse on computers I own for over 20 years. There are many tmux features I do not use. Still, I have not felt the urge to remove them. I use a statically-linked tmux with a few customisations that weighs in at 1.2M. That is smaller than the statically-linked text-only browser I use which comes in at 1.3M. But perhaps I will try to trim down tmux as an experiment if these unused features are in fact taking up significant space.

In some sense it's not a good terminal emulator (I hit several glitches in it on macOS, though it seems to do better on my NixOS machine), but I'm in love with cool-retro-term for its gorgeous CRT-style visuals.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

I mention it because it doesn't have tabs, saved sessions, or any of the other features tmux handles.

So, it's not a bad fit for heavy tmux users.

If you're using Wayland, foot is fast, lightweight, and has good color and font support: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

Konsole is faster than Alacritty, but much easier to configure.

uxterm is the fastest.

    Latency in milliseconds

    Program    mean  std  min   90%   max
    uxterm     1.7   0.3  0.7   2     2.4
    mlterm     1.8   0.3  0.7   2.2   2.5
    Konsole    13.4  1.2  11.5  15    16.1
    Alacritty  15.1  1.2  12.8  15.9  26.3

Those Alacritty numbers look an awful lot like reporting framerate tuning rather than underlying performance (16.6ms latency being one frame at 60hz).

Unsure how that was measured, but I'd like to see urxvtd up there. I'd bet a beer it's statistically significant faster. :)

https://st.suckless.org/

this.

Seconded. Blisteringly fast to compile. No weird dependencies. A functional and sane choice in a broken world gone mad.

Unsure what you consider as "good color support" but you might want to look at the original (xterm) or at rxvt.

I use Guake, mostly to bring up the "console" as a full screen overlay, like you would with Quake :)

As a former Guake user, I recommend you to try Tilix.

I love Konsole, it's super customizable and easy to use.

Alacritty: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

Most distro-default/DE-default terminal emulators don't really make you do 'more' than just have a base terminal emulator. The extra stuff (in the likes of gnome-terminal for example) only surfaces when you actually use it, except for when you have duplicate key binds. If you don't use a DE, or don't like Qt/GTK based engines, urxvt and xterm are the best remaining options.

Zutty is an option if you don't mind trying (often) unpackaged software, but then st would fit as well with the performance difference being that Zutty leverages GPU rendering for more performance and st doesn't seem to do that by itself.

If graphics isn't your thing and you're just on the frame buffer directly, there is fbterm.

A lot of the 'advertised' emulators seem to be targeting aesthetic and 'cool' marketability, some are even based on electron or try to put filters on the output...

Here's a list somebody posted yesterday on the arch reddit https://github.com/asdf8dfafjk/Terminal-Features/blob/main/F...

I used Zutty (https://tomscii.sig7.se/zutty/) for a bit, it's nice, but Konsole has nicer integration with the rest of KDE, so I went back to that.

What's wrong with the default in whatever distro you're using?

Not all distros have a default (e.g. Arch)

Been using urxvt for many years, this year I replaced it with kitty (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/), will stay probably for as many years as urxvt :)

Foot's already been mentioned, which is my Wayland goto. For X, I like Sakura.

`rxvt`. Debian has a few different packages, for different build-time options.

tilix https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/

You can disable everything in it. I just use it mainly for the panes.

I use foot, which has been quite good.

wezterm has lots of bells and whistles, but is fast and you can ignore the other features.

Yeah I used to use alacritty with the ligature patch, but swapped to wezterm as it supports ligatures natively. It's fast enough, maybe not as fast as alacrity or kitty.

I just don't use the built in multiplexer or whatever.

I think if you're running tmux, a lot of kitty/alacrity's performance is mooted anyway?

Yeah, tmux is not super fast. I really have liked wezterm, everything is just right for me. It does just enough of what tmux does that I use.

extrateterm is pretty good (https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm)

...unbind "new tab" button ?

mlterm. it has no bells and whistles a part from full unicode support including bidi

Surprising related fact: terminal multiplexers appear to be a relative neologism, multiple terminal emulators running on a graphical system likely predate them by years. I've been trying to dig my way into the history for funsies recently, below is hacked out of my notes that will eventually be a post or article or something.

Window by Edward Wang is in 4.3BSD in 1986, and it's the earliest member of the species I can find.

Screen was initially written by Oliver Laumann and Carsten Bormann at TU Berlin in 1987.

tmux didn't happen until 2007.

By contrast, blit terminals could run multiple terminal emulators in graphical windows around 1982 (commercial by 84; http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/ ). Likewise, some of the UNIX workstation vendors' early windowing systems like Sun Windowing System (SunOS 1.0, 1983) supported multiple terminal emulators. The earliest graphical multiple terminal emulator is probably Xerox PARC's Alto, which could run multi-window Chat (which was more or less a telnet superset) for talking to PARC's bespoke MAXC PDP-10 clone or other ARPA sites in 1979 or so.

The necessary condition for software terminal multiplexing (a robust pseudoterminal system) has been around for a very long time in places like the DEC 36-bit lineage: it was present in the PDP-6 Time Sharing Monitor announced in 1967 ( http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp6/PDP-6_TimsharingBroch.pdf ), and continued to be present in most of the PDP-10 systems, importantly the TENEX line, and was later available in some of the smaller DEC systems like RSTS for the PDP-11. That was enough to detach and reattach jobs to terminals, but I can't find record of a screen-splitting tool. There were some patches from RAND and BBN to 6th edition UNIX by the late 70s ( https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/dmr/p... ), but there wasn't really wide-spread PTY support in UNIX until 1983 when 8th edition and 4.2 BSD sprung TENEX-like psuedoterminals, which kind of puts a lower bound on UNIX-like systems having such a thing.

It's possible EMACS was first, still in PDP-10 environments. ITS EMACS had some kind of hsplit support early on, possibly as early as April 1978 ( https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/eak/emacs.lore ), and later some limited terminal-dependent vsplit support was developed for Multics EMACS between 84-88 by Honeywell Canada on behalf of the Canadian Department of National Defense for use in translation work ( http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/honeywell/multics/CH2... ). I can't find a record of when Comint mode or something like it came into being, which is necessary to use it as a terminal multiplexer.

There's a whole diversion about SRI NLS being able to do terminal multiplexing in demos on a SDS940 running the Berkeley Time Sharing System by the late 60s. They never split to multiple text terminals in any footage I've seen, and at least early on it seems the apparent screen multiplexing in eg. the mother of all demos in '68, was done with cameras pointed at CRTs and analog video muxes.

I use these (depending on the needs):

- xterm

- urxvt

- sakura

- terminator

foot works great for me.

evilvte

sakura

A terminal emulator is a high-value large attack surface that any hacker worth his salt would love to get into the supply chain. Therefore, unless your Unix machines are toys, it's a good idea to stick to reputable and well-maintained software, and for me that means what's in the distro's default repos. Every time you add third-party gunk you open yourself up to exploits from God knows where.

Why not just use tmux? It’s super nice.

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