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Discussion on: What's Your Favorite Text Editor or Terminal Emulator?

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Jesse Portnoy • Edited

VIM and BASH, respectively.

EDIT: I now see the question was about the terminal emulator, not SHELL (funny how the mind edits for you; I'm keeping what I wrote about BASH though:)).

I don't have a very strong opinion about the emulator to be honest. I've used konsole for many years and am now using lxterminal.

VIM - already available or easily installable on every UNIX box. Lightweight yet super extendible and powerful. Requires no X/Wayland and can therefore be used remotely with no lag penalties. In most distros, it comes preconfigured with all the basic plugins (syntax highlighting for most commonly used languages, auto completion, what have you).

BASH - for the same core reasons. There are other shells out there that provide a nice feature or another (or a few) that BASH hasn't got however, as with VIM but more so, BASH is the standard interactive shell in most distros. This is a major advantage because:

  • Every veteran knows how to use its basic functions and edit its resource files
  • Novices will learn to do so as well since most tutorials tend to assume the use of BASH for these very reasons.

Using BASH means you'll never have to waste your time porting a project's (or tutorial) code and configurations from BASH to your shell of choice. It also means you're far more likely to get answers when you're stuck on something.

And of course, needless to say - they are both FOSS and neither is owned by a commercial mammoth:)

If anyone's interested, I've recently written this article: dev.to/jessp01/take-your-bash-scri...

Cheers,

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Jesse Portnoy • Edited

I'm a little embarrassed to have misread the question initially. I hope I caught it before too many people read my comment as shells and terminal emulators are completely different things and I wouldn't want anyone to think I, of all people, do not know the difference...

It is not my intention to hijack this post by any means but, may I ask: how many people feel that working with their terminal emulator of choice makes a big difference and why? I think my mind edited the question simply because to me, so long as the emulator supports tabs and colour scheme configuration (and most modern ones do, really), I'm happy. When working with a new one, the only thing I do sometimes need to get used to is the key sequence to open a new tab as for some reason, some emulators do not support assigning your own.

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Ben Sinclair

I think that the common terminal emulators, like iterm, Windows terminal, the Gnome bits and bobs, are all so similar to use that it makes no odds.

Whenever I've used anything else, I find that the missing bits overshadow the exciting new features. For example, I like using tabs to separate some sessions (mostly because nesting tmux sessions is a less-than-great idea) and alacritty doesn't support tabs, or I just don't want to use yet another electron app, or whatever.

With the core set of features:

  • custom font and colour scheme
  • respects keyboard shortcuts to change font size
  • the tabs thing I was talking about before
  • er, that's it

then terminals disappear into the background of the OS and behave basically the same on whichever OS I'm using at the time.