What terminal emulators are available for heavy terminal users?

Question

I spend a lot of time at the command-line during the workday and at home too since I run Ubuntu exclusively.

I've been using the default gnome terminal but I've reached a point where I'd really like to get my terminal tricked out so that my common tasks are as easy as possible. Specifically, I find that I spend of lot of time browsing code in the terminal and working in config files.

On my wish list would be:

• Ability to have multiple screens, tabs, windows (I don't have a preference at this point) that I can easily switch between.
• Color coding for everything
• Easy to modify the aesthetics of the terminal (is it vain to want my terminal to look nice?) such as transparency, borders, etc.

Solution 1

I personally use gnome-terminal as my terminal emulator. Using gnome-terminal, I run GNU Screen (byobu to be specific) in order to work with multiple windows. You can become really efficient with it. I use GNU Screen because I often have long-lived terminal sessions that I can check on or come back to later.

gnome-terminal running byobu (showing only one window open)

You seem more interested in a graphical solution for managing terminal windows. For this, I highly suggest the terminal emulator Terminator, which supports multiple windows without the need for a multiplexer like GNU Screen. You can split it horizontally and vertically as much as you like and there are even tabs. If you just feel like running lots of terminals, Terminator is really good.

Terminator (showing multiple Terminator windows open)

Solution 2

Besides GNU screen I would recommend tmux. It is a terminal multiplexer like GNU screen.

Solution 3

I like guake, which is a drop-down editor (named after the console in games like quake). You press a button and it slides down, press another button and it hides away. Press another button to make it full screen, etc. It supports transparency, tabs, color... you name it. (You could run GNU screen on the inside to get more than one visible at a time.)

It's on the top of this screenshot, transparently overlaid some stuff I was doing. (Click for full size.) I think it looks good.

Solution 4

One note: terminal multiplexer (tmux, screen, etc.) is not the same as terminal emulator (xterm, gnome-terminal, urxvt, etc.)

Aside from a recommendation (mine would definitely be tmux and I've switched from screen a while ago) you asked about customisations.

Color coding for everything

Make sure to choose a terminal that can support 256 colors. You can test if it does by downloading a simple Perl script from http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/data/256colors2.pl. chmod +x it and run it (after of course looking briefly at its code).

Another thing is (if you decide to use tmux) is to make sure it sets the TERM environment variable correctly. Make sure to put:

set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

in your ~/.tmux.conf file.

Easy to modify the aesthetics of the terminal (is it vain to want my terminal to look nice?) such as transparency, borders, etc.

I'm using urxvt after switching from aterm (I've used gnome-terminal, xterm and many others before). Both have support for transparency and are fast (I'm talking about being able to display a long stream of lines quickly). They're configurable with ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults.

Borders? I think it's up to your window manager to draw those, which in turn depends on the theme you use. Good luck.

Solution 5

I highly recommend Terminator.

Colour coding depends on the commands you use though. grep and ls both accept --color

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Comments

[enzotib]

worth mentioning a somewhat similar solution for kde, yakuake.

[kzh]

Using tmux instead of screen, invalidates the need for terminator. You can't really use terminator over a remote terminal.

[Stann]

afaik gnu screen is pretty much dead project now. isn't it?

[marc-andre benoit]

also pragprog (.com) has a nice (paper) book for tmux beginners

[Adri C.S.]

+1 I also like this awesome thing called guake.

[Stew]

@Stann: GNU screen appears to be alive and well. As of 2015-11-05, the last update to the master branch was 4 weeks ago: git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git

[Stew]

To avoid confusion, tmux is not itself a terminal emulator. In order to use tmux, one must first choose a terminal emulator (e.g. gnome-terminal, terminator or guake, all of which are suggested by the top answers here).

[Vitaly Zdanevich]

Another usefull feature of Terminator is ability to copy-on-select, for me it is basic functionality.

[Pablo Bianchi]

Worth to mention you can use terminal multiplexers like tmux or byobu (which use tmux as default backend) as default shell interpreter of Guake (emulator).

[Pablo Bianchi]

Byobu uses tmux (hopefully, instead of screen) as default backend.

[loxaxs]

Tilda with tmuxit is for me. -- Tilda's default values are really nice. The options we want are also easy to access -- apt install tilda -- Right click -> config to re-open the configuration window. -- The configurations files are in .config/tilda. -- If you open two instances at a time, they will use different configuration files.