Poll: What is your favourite terminal program? [closed]

Question

What is your favourite terminal program?

Are you a xterm traditionalist or an eterm fanboy?
Do you stick with what comes with your windowing environment:
gnome-terminal, konsole, cmd.exe or terminal.app?
Maybe aterm is more your thing or even rxvt?

Let us know!

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This is a poll, so please only one terminal per answer. Upvote your choice, tell us why in a comment.

Answer 1

• I install XFCE terminal now whenever I have X, it has all the features you'd expect and it does it all well.

Answer 2

While I am on windows I use putty.

Answer 3

Terminal.app when using Mac OS X

Answer 4

gnu screen, hands down.

Answer 5

Gnome Terminal

Answer 6

iTerm on OS X. http://iterm.sourceforge.net/

Answer 7

SecureCRT (Windows).

Answer 8

Konsole, as I'm most of the time on KDE!

Answer 9

This question mistakenly labels cmd.exe as a terminal. Cmd.exe is a text-mode shell and so is powershell.exe. The "terminal" is the console window which is automagically created by csrss.exe (aka client-server runtime subsystem (aka windows subsystem)).

(More here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/12/31/6909007.aspx)

The gist of all that is that there isn't really a viable terminal option for Windows other than the default magic. There is Console2 which actually works by doing voodoo with a hidden csrss console window and doesn't work on x64 windows. It is possible to do xterm with Cygwin but again doesn't work on x64. One can use xterm using the aforementioned SUA + an x-server but then only text-mode applications will work attempting to start a Windows GUI app from a pty yields an error.

To answer the original question, I'm basically a curmudgeon so I tend to use the most basic built-in option for a given system:

• Windows: console windows
• OS X: terminal.app
• UNIX-alike with X: xterm

Answer 10

xterm on Linux and MSYS (for linux toolset) or Console2 on Windows. When testing stuff that will be used outside the organisation, I try to use the basic Terminal or Command Prompt.

Ehtyar.

Answer 11

cmd.exe, but I'm not happy with it. I just don't have an alternative.

I miss short file names and command.com (16-bit)

Answer 12

Back before I switched to full-time ubuntu, I used to like Terminator on windows quite a lot- nice list of features, including unlimited scrolling, infinite scrollback buffers, multiple tabs, etc etc etc.

- Typical usage (full size image).

- Large screen usage (full size image).

Answer 13

What about windows powershell?

Answer 14

PuTTY running with pageant on Windows to a Linux server running gnu screen. Nothing can touch it.

Answer 15

When using Windows, PuTTY is my terminal of choice.

On Mac, I just use Terminal.app with this modified Pro theme.

On Linux, I use rxvt-unicode-ml with the ANSI color scheme borrowed from PuTTY and some other tweaks to make it more like a normal GUI program rather than the next generation of a crotchety old X11 program.

Answer 16

Vanilla xterm.

Answer 17

I use Terminal.app with the Homebrew theme and antialiased Monaco 11pt text. It makes using the terminal a very comfortable and nice experience. I love Mac's font rendering.

Answer 18

I'm a terminal.app on OSX guy too

Answer 19

Console2 when I'm forced to use Windows.

Answer 20

I used to be a 100% aterm guy, but gnome-terminal cleaned up sufficiently around 3 years ago, at which point I stopped bothering to install aterm.

I loved it because it was lightning quick, easy to read and configure.

Though it was possibly a leftover from when i was running WindowMaker primarily.

Answer 21

PuTTY

Answer 22

I'm accustomed to using rxvt, mostly.

Answer 23

I prefer gnome-terminal until it starts causing me trouble, e.g. with cut-n-paste due to the complexity of Gnome. Then I switch to xterm for the remainder of the life of that desktop environment. I actually have one system on which I've been using gnome-terminal for months! The ability to configure gnome-terminal using reasonable means instead of the completely braindamaged historical mess of X resources is a big win.

Sadly, I find myself happier using putty on Windows. I don't ever use an xterm when sitting at a Windows machine.

You should always be using screen. I'm surprised a lot of people don't know about it - it should be more prominently advertised somewhere. In the days of dialup to shell providers, everyone used it and it was just well known. You won't realize how great screen is for about a week. The ability to handle multiple 'screens', and the nice cut-n-paste are just neat features. The detach/reattach support is very nice, e.g. to go to work, reattach your home screen session and your work screen session, then go home, sit down at your desk, reattach to both, the sit on the couch and reattach to both. This is an amazing convenience. Still, you won't notice how truly great it is until your desktop crashes and you can safely reattach to everything you were in the middle of with no trouble whatsoever. You can also leave screens open as a reminder of what you were in the middle of, take a real weekend off, and reattach and need to extra reminder of what you were doing.

Answer 24

SecureCRT, Console - for Windows

For Linux I prefer RoxTerm because it has tabs but require only GTK libs.

Answer 25

No Konsole users? I am a Fedora user and have always just used Konsole, never really looked at the alternatives though as it seems to just do everything well. I'm always willing to try new things though. :)

Oh, and putty on windows, with Putty Connection Manager (tabs, baby).

Answer 26

I am a big fan of teraterm utf-8. I do a lot of serial console work. It does a very good job at serial stuff as well as ssh, telnet, and the ilk.

And best of all it is free. :)

Answer 27

iTerm on the Mac is great. It is tabbed and has a great feature - send input to all tabs. Makes working on multiple identical servers a breeze.

Answer 28

The real Dickie xterm: invisible-island.net/xterm/

I have to connect to a range of servers - Solaris old and new, SCO, Macs, Linux, BSD - and the real Dickie xterm gives me least problems and maximum compatibility.

Why the Dickie xterm? It's old-time standard compliant. Shift-leftclick or shift-rightclick on the Dickie xterm and you can control major facets of xterm behaviour that you will need when moving between many different Unix systems.

You can use the .Xdefaults configuration file to control your default settings (including handling those silly Solaris function key issues). You can control starting sizes and positions, colour, keystrokes, terminal settings, almost everything. You can even standardise the ancient Delete/Backspace incompatibility problem between Linux and Solaris and SCO and other systems. Copy that .Xdefaults file everywhere you go and your xterms function identically no matter what system or OS you are on.

If you find a copy of Alan Southerton book The Shell Hacker's Guide To X and Motif, despite the ancient title, you can configure your xterm to do amazing things and have wild menus and functionality and that can seriously enhance your productivity either as a programmer or a sysadmin.

The Dickie xterm is so standard that all old texts and books and hints work with it, yet it keeps up with modern practices. It just doesn't do fancy modern graphics like see-through backgrounds and other things that impede work but look pretty.

Answer 29

Terminator!

It's the only terminal emulator I've found that has good support for "regions" in addition to "tabs" ('regions' being a split window, like screen does, but terminator supports vertical partitions). Default controls bind Ctrl+Shift+(O|E) to split the current region into 2 (vertical|horizontal) regions that are simultaneously displayed.

I have two screens, and I love to fullscreen Terminator to take up both screens. I tend to keep ~4-5 copies each of tail -f and top running on different servers in different regions while I do my shell work in yet another region. It's insanely helpful to be able to see them all on the screen at the same time.

Answer 30

Tera Term & PuTTY