st and xterm are definitely my two favorite terminals. I'm surprised that xterm doesn't get more love. People say it's bloated and/or old, and yet it manages to have the single lowest input latency compared to probably every other terminal, and I think that's an important aspect that is often overlooked.
Just a little knowledge on why Alacritty is larger in size. (compared with st, as an example) Alacritty is written in Rust, which compaile with static linking, whereas st is compiled with dynamic linking. Meaning, the Alacritty binary incluldes the libraries that comes with it, making no room for inconsistent experience among machines with different version of the dependencies used. However, it has to include the dependencies in its binary as well. Whereas st, and probably the others, are linked dynamically. It relies heavily on the library version on the system. This also imply the libraries has to be backward-compatible thus higher cost for maintenance, development and optimization (but the number of iterations still game). That also implies that the program may break depending on the version of dependencies installed on your system. Update: Thanks to Quarky for raising a very important point I have missed about dynamic linking. It allows quick deployment of fixes - one for all. Software updates are important guys.
@@CristianMolina That's mainly smaller size as duplicated libraries are not installed twice, which used to be vital in the old days, and still is a good-to-have. Another pros is that it benefits from all the years dynamic linking languages have prevailed.
@@CristianMolina I think both are mentioned. Maybe not in a clear way... 🤔 And a third I just wanted to add, is the compile time since no recompiling is needed for the library. But that is irrelevant if you download the binary.
You make it sound like static linking is the way of the future, when in fact it's far from it. The modern computing ecosystem has moved to dynamic linking for a good reason, and space efficiency is not it. Dynamic linking allows much faster security updates (remember Heart Bleed anyone?). Without dynamic linking pushing out security updates would be a nightmare. I don't know the exact reasons why Rust chooses static linking, but I would guess since static linking is much simpler in terms of the build process, and since Rust is still pretty new, Rust based system libraries aren't that common, so static linking makes sense - for now.
Kitty for a full featured well made terminal. Terminal emulators are such basic pieces of software, they should do the things you want / expect without fighting.
This right here! Kitty is awesome. Its minimal and has everything you need and more. I was a huge rxvt and st fan but i got sick of urxvt being hard to configure or not handling fonts and patching suckless tools is fucking retarded and im a seasoned linux user and C/C++ coder
I would like to point out that Greek was *not* rendered properly in Xterm or urxvt. This is very important for users who need full Greek support in the terminal. termit, st, and Alacritty all handled it beautifully, making me wish that I was running one of them right now instead of urxvt! Thanks for another great video, DT :)
I try out many terminal emulators. Here are the ones I like and used with no problems. xfce4-terminal gnome-terminal Konsole Terminator Termite sakura Love using tmux - which you can use with any of these. Not sure about them as minimal. But I can vouch, these terminal emulators won't give you any problems using any of these.
I didn't know what ligatures were, thanks to you mentioning them now my code will be easier to read. I also lost a couple hours installing new fonts. Its a shame alacritty doesn't support them yet.
Actually st received a font ligatures patch only recently. And ofc there is tabbed for tabs. It's not quite inbuilt but still, you'd be expected to patch st anyways
@@dtjohnst Yeah, you are absolutely right. I just made this comment when he mentioned it in the beginning so I wouldn't forget. Though I actually later on forgot that you don't need to patch st for scrolling anymore. You can just use "scroll" as a seperate program for that
Using xterm is a joy. It's a really minimal terminal emulator. It has scroll back, mouse support, CTRL + Right Click Menu that has many useful twerks. It existed from 1984 to till now 39 years old. it's still maintained it's codebase is really mature like any Goody of good old days.
For people having trouble with color emojis in alacritty similar to DT. Try removing ttf-dejavu, or replace it with ttf-dejavu-emojiless. You may also try prepending your color emoji font to the 'monospace', 'serif', and 'sans-serif' font in fonts.conf. So that whenever special characters are needed. Your color emoji is used first.
I mean... if it's truly minimal, I wouldn't be surprised that it didn't have tabs... That's kind of the point of minimalism, you get the base which you can expand/customize however you want.
If I need another terminal, I usually install ' LXterminal ' , in my opinion lightweight as well. Since my favorite desktop environment is KDE / Plasma, I use Konsole that comes with kde. I'm not in the tiling wm camp, I'm so used to using the mouse and floating windows. To be completely honest, I find it hard to switch to a tiling wm. Any content about tiling wm's and all that comes with it is of great interest to me. And Derek is just awesome, so I have to watch any video :-)
Tiling WMs are great fun and really stinking productive after you get them just right. If you are on an arch based system, go to tty, login as root and curl -LO larbs.xyz/larbs.sh bash larbs.sh Pick a different username so it'll create another user for you with DWM and I3 pre configured with many bells and whistels out of the box, after login in to the new setup do Mod4+F1 and read through the guide for the shortkeys and some orientation it'll blow your pants clean off!
@@zehph I found i3 to be great out of the box. Sure you gotta do stuff yourself but hey it's a wm after all. I especially love the default key bindings, shifting movement keys one key to the right makes for a much more natural experience.
@@sohn7767 I know some of Vi bindings thanks to Vimium and i3's setup still makes MUCH more sense. Vi keybindings were the way they were because it came out at a time where arrow keys didn't exist. Back in those days arrow keys were the secondary functions of hjkl. It made sense back than but it does not hold up, as I said using jkl; is a much more natural experience.
Fırat Altay I agree that it is more natural. On the other hand using your strongest fingers for the most common movement - up and down - feels better in the long run.
For fallback fonts in alacritty, it uses fontconfig settings. You can look at the output of `fc-match -s` or `fc-match -s "fontnamehere"` to see fonts that will be used and what their priority is by the order of the list. You can then also have a fontconfig fonts.conf file where you can make font family aliases and set specific fallbacks to use with a font.
I use the default gnome terminal, but I have it run byobu and fish shell. I love it. Fish is great out of the box and byobu, when I fixed some color settings, its amazing for tabs and moving arround and searching in the text.
I used windows my entire life- 3 years ago, windows decided to invalidate my genuine key after trying to get docker installed on the system. Windows literally un-registered itself; That's when I decided to learn linux. I've got to say, I will probably never go back- Everyday I learn something more and it's so fun to slap on new themes and configure scripts exactly how I want. You've got a new sub :D
I think XTerm is considered bloated from a *maintenance/developer* perspective. The code contains a lot of support for devices that have since become obsolete. This probably makes it hard to add new features or fix bugs.
I'm not sure about xterm in the video, but i use xterm and it does render the emoji list and the Unicode Test Pretty Well Without any errors. I think u might wanna fix your xterm tho it seems broken .
and along with utf-8 and emoji support, ST now has a patch for ligatures too! so you can have the cake and eat it too :) you just gotta work for it if you really want it lol
I switched terminal emulators a few days ago from urxvt to sakura. No ligatures but I'm not a programmer. Handles DT's two test docs perfectly with the right fonts installed and has tabs and is easy to config with right click menu. The key bindings are a bit weird to customize and there are some that work that are not in the config file. The terminal is really light at around 190k. Has only two dependencies. One was only 115k and already on my system for five other programs. The other is vte3 at only 1.6 meg. The whole thing is one third the install of urxvt with all addons and has more functionality.
Hello DT, I have recently started to configure URxvt as I completely fell in love with the keyboard-select extension - IMO it works just like in tmux, but 100 times better! Weirdly enough when I run the same curl command as you did, I get most of the symbols spot on (except Ethiopian). I use the following font settings in my .Xresources file: URxvt.font: xft:Inconsolata:size=11:antialias=true URxvt.letterSpace: 0 URxvt.lineSpace: 0 I heard that some fonts won't render properly if the font size is not an odd number ;) When it comes to emojis... well, I don't really use those anyway! Also I really love the way that URxvt handles "not handling" the unicode characters - it just displays them as blank boxes. When ST doesn't know how to handle given unicode character (due to lack of good font installed) it just crashes and it drove me nuts! Anyway, please try changing your font settings in .Xresources file. Keep doing the good work and have a great day!
@Peter Andrijeczko Fortunately I don't use much Ethiopian in my day-to-day work ;) v9.22 also comes with latest Debian stable (10.4), so this is what I'm using as well. I'm glad to have a proof that my favorite terminal emulator doesn't suck as much as in the DT tests ;D
I was using alacritty but the way it behaved with tmux and no ligatures lead me to move to kitty, which is blazing fast as well, works beautifully as I can also implement the same border padding which makes it cleaner.
Ligatures is one of the most worthless feature I've seen. You're just adding complexity that is essentially guarantees to break and for LESS readability.
I actually love urxvt. The one thing about it that gets me off is the lack of ligature support. Was quite a bummer to see it fail here in terms of Unicode support. I wasn't expecting that. Seems like I should give st a try, if it can offer the following via patching: 1. Scrollback 2. Colored output & support for bold fonts 3. Transparency 4. Ligatures. 5. Clipboard access 6. Adjusting font size on the fly. For the latter, I currently use a Perl extension which works like a charm. Never felt bugged with this plugin system actually.
Okay, for some reason, none of the available patches will actually work. I was able to set up my terminal font and kerning, but applying just about any patch using patch - i from within a folder where the st sources are stored, will not change a thing. No ligatures, no transparency, no nothing. Actually, even the Dracula theme patch fails at error. What nonsense is that?
Great video, thanks a lot for sharing the wisdom. I have a question though. How do you get that status line in vim? I have used both Vim 8.1 and Neovim 0.5 but I cannot get that status line. Is that how it looks in Arch Linux? Please let me know. Thanks!
Hey DT. I am wondering how you can change the sound brightness etc in common tiling window managers. That's the only thing keeping me away form tiling. It's really hard getting the multimedia keys working. Video idea right there
Here are the Functions you need. Map: XF86XK_MonBrightnessUp, to xbacklight -inc 15 XF86XK_MonBrightnessDown to xbacklight -dec 15 Adapt it to your WM syntax and be happy. You do have to have xbacklight and using Xorg, though most WM are on Xorg anyways... You can use light if you are using SWAY. But really dude, you can find this with 5min on Google. Here is a wall of text from my config.h (dwm) with many of these XF86 functions: { 0, XF86XK_AudioMute, spawn, SHCMD("pamixer -t; kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioRaiseVolume, spawn, SHCMD("pamixer --allow-boost -i 3; kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioLowerVolume, spawn, SHCMD("pamixer --allow-boost -d 3; kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioPrev, spawn, SHCMD("mpc prev") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioNext, spawn, SHCMD("mpc next") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioPause, spawn, SHCMD("mpc pause") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioPlay, spawn, SHCMD("mpc play") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioStop, spawn, SHCMD("mpc stop") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioRewind, spawn, SHCMD("mpc seek -10") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioForward, spawn, SHCMD("mpc seek +10") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioMedia, spawn, SHCMD("st -e ncmpcpp") }, { 0, XF86XK_PowerOff, spawn, SHCMD("sysact") }, { 0, XF86XK_Calculator, spawn, SHCMD("st -e bc -l") }, { 0, XF86XK_Sleep, spawn, SHCMD("sudo -A zzz") }, { 0, XF86XK_WWW, spawn, SHCMD("$BROWSER") }, { 0, XF86XK_DOS, spawn, SHCMD("st") }, { 0, XF86XK_ScreenSaver, spawn, SHCMD("slock & xset dpms force off; mpc pause; pauseallmpv") }, { 0, XF86XK_TaskPane, spawn, SHCMD("st -e htop") }, { 0, XF86XK_Mail, spawn, SHCMD("st -e neomutt ; pkill -RTMIN+12 dwmblocks") }, { 0, XF86XK_MyComputer, spawn, SHCMD("st -e lf /") }, /* { 0, XF86XK_Battery, spawn, SHCMD("") }, */ { 0, XF86XK_Launch1, spawn, SHCMD("xset dpms force off") }, There, you don't have to wait for a video! Go free yoursekf and learn to STFW properly
I like alacritty. Idk if it's the fastest truly, but it's just really minimal, really fast, and for me just werks. I got annoyed by st having random issues and lack of compatibility for random things. But alacritty has worked for almost everything I use. And you can always have a minimal terminal emulator, and use tabbed by suckless to get tabs. But I'm sure you know that.
21:10 the only thing st did wrong was the boxdraw alignment. If you look closely, you can see that there's some gaps between the characters. Of course, there's a patch for that.
You can actually configure st without changing the source code. You can edit .Xresources instead. Edit: I switched to urxvt and it handles all unicode characters pretty well.
Not sure if you are aware of Xiki or not! Its an amazing shell console, well more than a shell. Runs inside terminal. Its not related to this video but thought I might bring this up. Still works, though its very old, i guess was released 8 years ago. Give it a go, who knows, u may like it.
There was only one thing that make me switch away from termite, you have to quote the whole command after -e option, which makes it incompatible with some other programs, like some GUI file managers.
I use Terminator on my main system as it's nice to open it with multiple windows already ssh'd in to servers/etc, and at least on my system it's just as fast as anything else. For laptops/etc I just use Alacritty.
I tend to use tmux for that, and I get session persistence for free at the same time. Also I don't get tied to one terminal emulator, it's easier to switch around as barely use the terminal's functionality.
5. powershell runs on it 4. powershell runs on it 3. powershell runs very well on it 2. powershell runs on it 1. powershell runs very well on it I prefere zsh, but if you want to use powershell running as default shell on any of these terminal emulators, here it is: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-7
Powershell is the best goddamn shell ever made and i'm a linux user. Makes me bloody green with envy, its even open source, cross platform and POSIX compliant, sort of.
I don't know what you're on about the patches on st, i've been using it for a long time now and the only patch i have is the xresources patch, which i could have used the config.h file to do that anyway, and as for scrolling i use dvtm (really nice tmux alternative).
I was the same as you regarding urxvt, used it because everyone else did and it was utter hell for years. Tried Alacritty but the memory usage alone is through the roof, st user now
I also ran through pretty much all of those in my years. Urxvt was just a pain in the ass. After dabbing in alacritty and kitty for a while I finally switched to xfce-terminal. Alacritty and kitty are great and all but they had two problems. At the time my graphics driver was not working all the time and this meant that all my terminals would freeze occasionally because they were rendered on the GPU. The other issue is that with these "obscure" terminal emulators, if you ssh into a lot of machines, copying over your terminfo entries to all your hosts gets really annoying. xfce-terminal does all I want, it has transparency, unicode and emoji support and the terminfo is on every distro out there so I never have to copy over any terminfo files. So in terms of convenience, it just works.
@DistroTube Hey DT. Thanks for another fantastic video. I have one question though. Do you have any method to properly display country flags in a terminal? I have tried different emoji fonts, several terminal emulators, yet I have failed to display flags. Maybe some of you guys in our DT community already solved this problem. If so, please share the solution.
Thanks a lot for this video, DT. I too am running urxvt due to recommendations from friends. I would like to try out xterm. Would you mind doing a video on configuring xterm like you did one on xmonad? Would really appreciate that. Also, there is one more feature which I think is important than emoji support. And that is, how well do these terminal emulators handle image previews in ranger? URxvt and XTerm do it really well. ST, I don't quite remember. Termite is not good at all. I don't know about Alacritty.
I think your rxvt-unicode emoji rendering issue might be a font issue after all. I get some emojis - not all, but more than you saw. My font is Deja Vu Sans Mono
You can have color emojis, and all your unicode stuff in URXVT with: -rxvt-unicode-patched (AUR) -libxft-bgra (AUR) -Nice fonts installed & the right config (mine .Xresources for example): ... URxvt.font: xft:Roboto Mono for Powerline:size=12,xft:Noto Color Emoji:size=8 ...
Nice! Some day could you please cover which emulator does ranger best with specific reference to scrolling through the ~/Pictures folder with the image preview in the right pane?
I don't use Ranger and I don't use w3m image previews. But I do use Ueberzug image previews and it works just fine in all 5 of these terminals. So if Ranger allows, use Ueberzug instead of w3m-img and your previews should work pretty much on every terminal.
The only downside to Termite I have encountered is that it doesn't come packaged by default in some popular distros (i.e. Ubuntu), probably because it uses a modified version of libvte. Not a problem in Arch, but can be annoying if you're a distro nomad (i.e. your work forces you to use Ubuntu on a work laptop)
I've been using URxvt and it supports a lot more unicode characters than what was shown in this video. Only characters that didn't render were from the Runes and Ethiopian set, which is probably due to me not having all the font packages.
For urxvt etxists a addon to support tabs. Or you can use tabbed from suckless. tmux is also a way to get more tabs, with tmux you can even run your programs when you log out. I use st with tabbed and it works for me. Great comparison, I now think of patching st with emotji support to use telegram.
you just sold me on using termite, was going to use ST because DWM has it as default terminal, but i think termite is good enough, i dont really need to configure my terminal to heavily so termite will be great
The executable size really doesn't matter. I (believe) alacrity is written in rust-lang whereas the others are all variants of C, so the other terminals are probably dynamically linked whereas alacrity is probably static linked -- thus it'll have the largest binary. Even if they were all linked the same way, maybe it would still be the largest, but the whole debate doesn't really matter that much anyway when you're talking programs that small.
xterm was one of my favorites. There is nothing minimal with xterm, really. It has extensive menus, which at least in ubuntu can be had by using ctrl + mouse buttons. You can change font size with the menu, down to something called noseprint. meaning it is so small it cannot be read. I guess you could start a command that takes a long time to complete, that has copious output, use noseprint font to see if the command is completed. It has terminal log files, and reverse video, meaning white letters on black background, my favorite. After using that, gnome-terminal is okay, but not quite as good as xterm.
Can't disagree about Urxvt. It's the only terminal I've used, and it's been no walk in the park - I've fallen into the rut of: it's already config'd. Time to try something new, and let painful.
I can't be the only one using st without any patches... all the "missing features" relevant to me are already provided by tmux (which I always run in every terminal window anyway)
Are terminal emulators good beginner tool to learn bash and the basics of the linus terminal? Or is it meant for something else? I have a crappy laptop that in no way could run a virtual machine and I don’t like the idea of fiddling around with a real operating system. It’s nice to just be able to start over when something goes wrong and try stuff out. Is there an emulator/simulator like this?
Kitty is way less than minimal than the 5 he mentioned today, but I use it and really enjoy it. Mainly for the diff kitten to display two column diffs in terminal.
25:52 "Lines of Code" count is a plausible measure for developers (not modders!) which indicates the ease of maintainability of that software and therefore the higher probability of getting updates, fixes and feature extensions faster and at lower costs! And also it's a joy to work on 'em. The intelligence of creating the same thing simpler is also respectable.
Why does this bother you? I do that too sometimes, it's just the flow, hey let's look at this file, cat bla, oh wait that's kind of big, let's pipe it into less.
Definitely unerstand 'no transparency on temrinal' because for me... that kills readability and once you start fuckign with readability? You remove the entire POINT of the terminal.
The gnome-terminal and xfce4-terminal as far as I have seen the refresh rate is not as high as st or xterm. But unlike gnome-terminal xfce4-terminal does support image preview using w3m in vifm.
It is not only about terminal emulator you are using, but also about font. For me, urxvt, termite and st renders everything the same with errors in chinese, ethiopian and runes. Everything else is alright with DejaVu font.
I use alacritty for ranger. Better image support but termite for everything else. I've been on and off with st but is just buggy as hell when it comes to neovim.
I watched this video couple of months ago and thought hmm 🤔 Urxvt is this bad,lets see. Installed and configured it to my liking. Can confirm that it supports every character, unicode, emoji. Just use the proper hint, alias, and pixelsize. Because sometimes if you don't configure proper pixelsize for the specific font it just doesn't work then. The only thing urxvt doesn't have is Ligature support which I really like so I switched to kitty for Ligature, tabs and splits. Kitty pretty bloated but I use urxvt as a backup terminal.
00:00 Intro
01:20 Xterm
08:48 rxvt
13:42 termite
17:26 st
21:20 alacritty
30:04 Thanks Patreons!
How to install termite?
@@mihir.mishra install instructions : github.com/thestinger/termite
Also be available in the AUR Repository : www.archlinux.org/packages/?name=termite
St is there! So... i declare it as fair!
Tysm
termite is dead, no maintainer lmao
I used to use Alacritty but switched to Kitty for ligature and resizing fixes. Honestly it's just as fast and the configuration is cleaner imo.
Kitty is faster imo.
st and xterm are definitely my two favorite terminals.
I'm surprised that xterm doesn't get more love. People say it's bloated and/or old, and yet it manages to have the single lowest input latency compared to probably every other terminal, and I think that's an important aspect that is often overlooked.
Just a little knowledge on why Alacritty is larger in size. (compared with st, as an example)
Alacritty is written in Rust, which compaile with static linking, whereas st is compiled with dynamic linking.
Meaning, the Alacritty binary incluldes the libraries that comes with it, making no room for inconsistent experience among machines with different version of the dependencies used. However, it has to include the dependencies in its binary as well.
Whereas st, and probably the others, are linked dynamically. It relies heavily on the library version on the system. This also imply the libraries has to be backward-compatible thus higher cost for maintenance, development and optimization (but the number of iterations still game). That also implies that the program may break depending on the version of dependencies installed on your system.
Update: Thanks to Quarky for raising a very important point I have missed about dynamic linking. It allows quick deployment of fixes - one for all. Software updates are important guys.
Yep, comparing binaries sizes without looking at libs they use doesn't really make sense
Dynamic link libs also has benefits. They should be listed together with the cons
@@CristianMolina
That's mainly smaller size as duplicated libraries are not installed twice, which used to be vital in the old days, and still is a good-to-have.
Another pros is that it benefits from all the years dynamic linking languages have prevailed.
@@CristianMolina I think both are mentioned. Maybe not in a clear way... 🤔
And a third I just wanted to add, is the compile time since no recompiling is needed for the library. But that is irrelevant if you download the binary.
You make it sound like static linking is the way of the future, when in fact it's far from it. The modern computing ecosystem has moved to dynamic linking for a good reason, and space efficiency is not it. Dynamic linking allows much faster security updates (remember Heart Bleed anyone?). Without dynamic linking pushing out security updates would be a nightmare.
I don't know the exact reasons why Rust chooses static linking, but I would guess since static linking is much simpler in terms of the build process, and since Rust is still pretty new, Rust based system libraries aren't that common, so static linking makes sense - for now.
Kitty for a full featured well made terminal. Terminal emulators are such basic pieces of software, they should do the things you want / expect without fighting.
Can we disable font anti-aliasing yet?
Why would you want to disable that? o.0
This right here! Kitty is awesome. Its minimal and has everything you need and more. I was a huge rxvt and st fan but i got sick of urxvt being hard to configure or not handling fonts and patching suckless tools is fucking retarded and im a seasoned linux user and C/C++ coder
kitty is faster than alacritty
I would like to point out that Greek was *not* rendered properly in Xterm or urxvt. This is very important for users who need full Greek support in the terminal. termit, st, and Alacritty all handled it beautifully, making me wish that I was running one of them right now instead of urxvt!
Thanks for another great video, DT :)
I try out many terminal emulators. Here are the ones I like and used with no problems.
xfce4-terminal
gnome-terminal
Konsole
Terminator
Termite
sakura
Love using tmux - which you can use with any of these. Not sure about them as minimal. But I can vouch, these terminal emulators won't give you any problems using any of these.
I didn't know what ligatures were, thanks to you mentioning them now my code will be easier to read.
I also lost a couple hours installing new fonts.
Its a shame alacritty doesn't support them yet.
Actually st received a font ligatures patch only recently. And ofc there is tabbed for tabs. It's not quite inbuilt but still, you'd be expected to patch st anyways
You could use tabbed for other terminal emulators so that doesn't count. That ligatures patch on the other hand is a nice thing I have to check.
@Agnish Roy ligature renders things like '=
He does mention that near the end.
@@dtjohnst Yeah, you are absolutely right. I just made this comment when he mentioned it in the beginning so I wouldn't forget. Though I actually later on forgot that you don't need to patch st for scrolling anymore. You can just use "scroll" as a seperate program for that
Why can't I patch st? Everytime I try to patch it I get a bunch of hunks not merged and stuff
Every body gangsta till someone fire's up tty😂
The minimal godlike terminal that literally runs a full fledged display server. I can't ask for anything better.
Using xterm is a joy. It's a really minimal terminal emulator. It has scroll back, mouse support, CTRL + Right Click Menu that has many useful twerks. It existed from 1984 to till now 39 years old. it's still maintained it's codebase is really mature like any Goody of good old days.
For people having trouble with color emojis in alacritty similar to DT. Try removing ttf-dejavu, or replace it with ttf-dejavu-emojiless.
You may also try prepending your color emoji font to the 'monospace', 'serif', and 'sans-serif' font in fonts.conf. So that whenever special characters are needed. Your color emoji is used first.
I was just searching for a terminal emulator yesterday! This video is what I needed right now! Thanks
Great video! Never found useful tabs in terminals so I consider that minimal terminals to be my choice
I mean... if it's truly minimal, I wouldn't be surprised that it didn't have tabs... That's kind of the point of minimalism, you get the base which you can expand/customize however you want.
If I need another terminal, I usually install ' LXterminal ' , in my opinion lightweight as well.
Since my favorite desktop environment is KDE / Plasma, I use Konsole that comes with kde.
I'm not in the tiling wm camp, I'm so used to using the mouse and floating windows.
To be completely honest, I find it hard to switch to a tiling wm.
Any content about tiling wm's and all that comes with it is of great interest to me. And Derek is just awesome, so I have to watch any video :-)
Tiling WMs are great fun and really stinking productive after you get them just right.
If you are on an arch based system, go to tty, login as root and
curl -LO larbs.xyz/larbs.sh
bash larbs.sh
Pick a different username so it'll create another user for you with DWM and I3 pre configured with many bells and whistels out of the box, after login in to the new setup do Mod4+F1 and read through the guide for the shortkeys and some orientation it'll blow your pants clean off!
@@zehph I found i3 to be great out of the box. Sure you gotta do stuff yourself but hey it's a wm after all. I especially love the default key bindings, shifting movement keys one key to the right makes for a much more natural experience.
Fırat Altay it makes sende at first, but once you learn vi bindings, it doesn’t.
@@sohn7767 I know some of Vi bindings thanks to Vimium and i3's setup still makes MUCH more sense. Vi keybindings were the way they were because it came out at a time where arrow keys didn't exist. Back in those days arrow keys were the secondary functions of hjkl. It made sense back than but it does not hold up, as I said using jkl; is a much more natural experience.
Fırat Altay I agree that it is more natural. On the other hand using your strongest fingers for the most common movement - up and down - feels better in the long run.
For fallback fonts in alacritty, it uses fontconfig settings. You can look at the output of `fc-match -s` or `fc-match -s "fontnamehere"` to see fonts that will be used and what their priority is by the order of the list. You can then also have a fontconfig fonts.conf file where you can make font family aliases and set specific fallbacks to use with a font.
I really like kitty ^^
Calcurse - great calendar with notes function. Simple.
urxvt is by far my favorite terminal emulator, but configure it is a PAIN IN THE ASS
Man, I've been looking to dump Gnome Terminal for awhile, but never liked anything else. Termite won out the day! Appreciate it, man.
I use the default gnome terminal, but I have it run byobu and fish shell. I love it. Fish is great out of the box and byobu, when I fixed some color settings, its amazing for tabs and moving arround and searching in the text.
I used windows my entire life- 3 years ago, windows decided to invalidate my genuine key after trying to get docker installed on the system. Windows literally un-registered itself; That's when I decided to learn linux. I've got to say, I will probably never go back- Everyday I learn something more and it's so fun to slap on new themes and configure scripts exactly how I want. You've got a new sub :D
I think XTerm is considered bloated from a *maintenance/developer* perspective. The code contains a lot of support for devices that have since become obsolete. This probably makes it hard to add new features or fix bugs.
Xterm will always be my first love.
I'm not sure about xterm in the video, but i use xterm and it does render the emoji list and the Unicode Test Pretty Well Without any errors.
I think u might wanna fix your xterm tho it seems broken .
Great video, was looking for a replacement for URxvt
DT is quite happy for Termite😄😁
and along with utf-8 and emoji support, ST now has a patch for ligatures too! so you can have the cake and eat it too :) you just gotta work for it if you really want it lol
Every time that i see your Matrix Background running on that screen,i cant not remember Cypher....i think,you are the real Cypher...
I switched terminal emulators a few days ago from urxvt to sakura. No ligatures but I'm not a programmer. Handles DT's two test docs perfectly with the right fonts installed and has tabs and is easy to config with right click menu. The key bindings are a bit weird to customize and there are some that work that are not in the config file. The terminal is really light at around 190k. Has only two dependencies. One was only 115k and already on my system for five other programs. The other is vte3 at only 1.6 meg. The whole thing is one third the install of urxvt with all addons and has more functionality.
My default for a long while was urxvt. It was solid. I have since switched to alacritty for #reasons. Thanks for the video.
Hello DT,
I have recently started to configure URxvt as I completely fell in love with the keyboard-select extension - IMO it works just like in tmux, but 100 times better! Weirdly enough when I run the same curl command as you did, I get most of the symbols spot on (except Ethiopian). I use the following font settings in my .Xresources file:
URxvt.font: xft:Inconsolata:size=11:antialias=true
URxvt.letterSpace: 0
URxvt.lineSpace: 0
I heard that some fonts won't render properly if the font size is not an odd number ;)
When it comes to emojis... well, I don't really use those anyway!
Also I really love the way that URxvt handles "not handling" the unicode characters - it just displays them as blank boxes. When ST doesn't know how to handle given unicode character (due to lack of good font installed) it just crashes and it drove me nuts!
Anyway, please try changing your font settings in .Xresources file. Keep doing the good work and have a great day!
@Peter Andrijeczko Fortunately I don't use much Ethiopian in my day-to-day work ;) v9.22 also comes with latest Debian stable (10.4), so this is what I'm using as well. I'm glad to have a proof that my favorite terminal emulator doesn't suck as much as in the DT tests ;D
Right now st is pretty nice with its ligature patch. I'd have loved it if alacritty supports it as well
I was using alacritty but the way it behaved with tmux and no ligatures lead me to move to kitty, which is blazing fast as well, works beautifully as I can also implement the same border padding which makes it cleaner.
Ligatures is one of the most worthless feature I've seen. You're just adding complexity that is essentially guarantees to break and for LESS readability.
I actually love urxvt. The one thing about it that gets me off is the lack of ligature support. Was quite a bummer to see it fail here in terms of Unicode support. I wasn't expecting that.
Seems like I should give st a try, if it can offer the following via patching: 1. Scrollback 2. Colored output & support for bold fonts 3. Transparency 4. Ligatures. 5. Clipboard access 6. Adjusting font size on the fly.
For the latter, I currently use a Perl extension which works like a charm. Never felt bugged with this plugin system actually.
Font rendering always looked kind of weird on urxvt for me.
Here's what I know st supports with patches: 1 yes, 2 yes (not 100% sure on bold fonts but I'm pretty sure), 3 yes, 4 yes, 5 yes, 6 yes
Everything in your list is supported by patches to st.
Thanks for your comments, everyone. I'll be sure to check it out then ☺️ As for the font rendering on urxvt, I agree, it could be better.
Okay, for some reason, none of the available patches will actually work. I was able to set up my terminal font and kerning, but applying just about any patch using patch - i from within a folder where the st sources are stored, will not change a thing. No ligatures, no transparency, no nothing. Actually, even the Dracula theme patch fails at error. What nonsense is that?
A tip, st is the only in the list and probably the only minimal terminal emulator that have font-ligature support via patch
Great video, thanks a lot for sharing the wisdom. I have a question though. How do you get that status line in vim? I have used both Vim 8.1 and Neovim 0.5 but I cannot get that status line.
Is that how it looks in Arch Linux? Please let me know. Thanks!
Hey DT. I am wondering how you can change the sound brightness etc in common tiling window managers. That's the only thing keeping me away form tiling. It's really hard getting the multimedia keys working. Video idea right there
Here are the Functions you need.
Map:
XF86XK_MonBrightnessUp, to xbacklight -inc 15
XF86XK_MonBrightnessDown to xbacklight -dec 15
Adapt it to your WM syntax and be happy. You do have to have xbacklight and using Xorg, though most WM are on Xorg anyways...
You can use light if you are using SWAY. But really dude, you can find this with 5min on Google.
Here is a wall of text from my config.h (dwm) with many of these XF86 functions:
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioMute, spawn, SHCMD("pamixer -t; kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)") },
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioRaiseVolume, spawn, SHCMD("pamixer --allow-boost -i 3; kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)") },
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioLowerVolume, spawn, SHCMD("pamixer --allow-boost -d 3; kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)") },
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioPrev, spawn, SHCMD("mpc prev") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioNext, spawn, SHCMD("mpc next") },
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioPause, spawn, SHCMD("mpc pause") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioPlay, spawn, SHCMD("mpc play") },
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioStop, spawn, SHCMD("mpc stop") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioRewind, spawn, SHCMD("mpc seek -10") },
{ 0, XF86XK_AudioForward, spawn, SHCMD("mpc seek +10") }, { 0, XF86XK_AudioMedia, spawn, SHCMD("st -e ncmpcpp") },
{ 0, XF86XK_PowerOff, spawn, SHCMD("sysact") }, { 0, XF86XK_Calculator, spawn, SHCMD("st -e bc -l") },
{ 0, XF86XK_Sleep, spawn, SHCMD("sudo -A zzz") }, { 0, XF86XK_WWW, spawn, SHCMD("$BROWSER") },
{ 0, XF86XK_DOS, spawn, SHCMD("st") },
{ 0, XF86XK_ScreenSaver, spawn, SHCMD("slock & xset dpms force off; mpc pause; pauseallmpv") },
{ 0, XF86XK_TaskPane, spawn, SHCMD("st -e htop") },
{ 0, XF86XK_Mail, spawn, SHCMD("st -e neomutt ; pkill -RTMIN+12 dwmblocks") },
{ 0, XF86XK_MyComputer, spawn, SHCMD("st -e lf /") }, /* { 0, XF86XK_Battery, spawn, SHCMD("") }, */
{ 0, XF86XK_Launch1, spawn, SHCMD("xset dpms force off") },
There, you don't have to wait for a video! Go free yoursekf and learn to STFW properly
I like alacritty. Idk if it's the fastest truly, but it's just really minimal, really fast, and for me just werks. I got annoyed by st having random issues and lack of compatibility for random things. But alacritty has worked for almost everything I use.
And you can always have a minimal terminal emulator, and use tabbed by suckless to get tabs. But I'm sure you know that.
But it is quite heavy. One Window eats like 30mb
21:10 the only thing st did wrong was the boxdraw alignment. If you look closely, you can see that there's some gaps between the characters. Of course, there's a patch for that.
I am not sure if it depends on the font or not, but my st build renders the box characters perfectly without the patch.
@@luxucn that's weird. Not sure why that is. All I know is that in tmux the boxdrawing looks pretty bad without the patch.
Currently using st, just patching for mouse scroll, I don't really care about unicode or emoji, after all it's just terminal, nice review btw!
You can actually configure st without changing the source code. You can edit .Xresources instead. Edit: I switched to urxvt and it handles all unicode characters pretty well.
Not sure if you are aware of Xiki or not! Its an amazing shell console, well more than a shell. Runs inside terminal. Its not related to this video but thought I might bring this up. Still works, though its very old, i guess was released 8 years ago. Give it a go, who knows, u may like it.
There was only one thing that make me switch away from termite, you have to quote the whole command after -e option, which makes it incompatible with some other programs, like some GUI file managers.
I just like xterm, it just works
It also has the best input latency of them all.
urxvt : resources usage its just better than them all . you can fix fonts but its a pain in the ass.
Yeah - just looking at the file size doesn't really tell you much does it
I use Terminator on my main system as it's nice to open it with multiple windows already ssh'd in to servers/etc, and at least on my system it's just as fast as anything else. For laptops/etc I just use Alacritty.
Splitting a terminal is essential for me. +1 for Terminator.
I tend to use tmux for that, and I get session persistence for free at the same time. Also I don't get tied to one terminal emulator, it's easier to switch around as barely use the terminal's functionality.
5. Not Powershell
4. Not Powershell
3. Not Powershell
2. Not Powershell
1. TTY
Powershell is not a terminal emulator
Powershell as the name suggest it's a command shell like bash or zsh
5. powershell runs on it
4. powershell runs on it
3. powershell runs very well on it
2. powershell runs on it
1. powershell runs very well on it
I prefere zsh, but if you want to use powershell running as default shell on any of these terminal emulators, here it is: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-7
Powershell is the best goddamn shell ever made and i'm a linux user. Makes me bloody green with envy, its even open source, cross platform and POSIX compliant, sort of.
I don't know what you're on about the patches on st, i've been using it for a long time now and the only patch i have is the xresources patch, which i could have used the config.h file to do that anyway, and as for scrolling i use dvtm (really nice tmux alternative).
Honestly I use kitty, for some reason it creams Alacritty in many cases (such as rendering pfetch) and I like its config setup
it is faster than alacritty
Does someone have experience with kitty?
I was the same as you regarding urxvt, used it because everyone else did and it was utter hell for years. Tried Alacritty but the memory usage alone is through the roof, st user now
st has ligature support via a patch
I use it all the time :)
I also ran through pretty much all of those in my years. Urxvt was just a pain in the ass. After dabbing in alacritty and kitty for a while I finally switched to xfce-terminal.
Alacritty and kitty are great and all but they had two problems. At the time my graphics driver was not working all the time and this meant that all my terminals would freeze occasionally because they were rendered on the GPU. The other issue is that with these "obscure" terminal emulators, if you ssh into a lot of machines, copying over your terminfo entries to all your hosts gets really annoying.
xfce-terminal does all I want, it has transparency, unicode and emoji support and the terminfo is on every distro out there so I never have to copy over any terminfo files. So in terms of convenience, it just works.
@DistroTube
Hey DT. Thanks for another fantastic video. I have one question though. Do you have any method to properly display country flags in a terminal? I have tried different emoji fonts, several terminal emulators, yet I have failed to display flags. Maybe some of you guys in our DT community already solved this problem. If so, please share the solution.
I love I3wm... in tilling window manager who does need tabs? I use Termite, but I have some config problems over ssh so use urxvt for that purpose.
Thanks a lot for this video, DT.
I too am running urxvt due to recommendations from friends. I would like to try out xterm. Would you mind doing a video on configuring xterm like you did one on xmonad? Would really appreciate that.
Also, there is one more feature which I think is important than emoji support. And that is, how well do these terminal emulators handle image previews in ranger? URxvt and XTerm do it really well. ST, I don't quite remember. Termite is not good at all. I don't know about Alacritty.
What about kitty?
I'm also curious about it
Kitty is not minimal at all.
I think your rxvt-unicode emoji rendering issue might be a font issue after all. I get some emojis - not all, but more than you saw. My font is Deja Vu Sans Mono
You can have color emojis, and all your unicode stuff in URXVT with:
-rxvt-unicode-patched (AUR)
-libxft-bgra (AUR)
-Nice fonts installed & the right config (mine .Xresources for example):
...
URxvt.font: xft:Roboto Mono for Powerline:size=12,xft:Noto Color Emoji:size=8
...
Nice! Some day could you please cover which emulator does ranger best with specific reference to scrolling through the ~/Pictures folder with the image preview in the right pane?
I don't use Ranger and I don't use w3m image previews. But I do use Ueberzug image previews and it works just fine in all 5 of these terminals. So if Ranger allows, use Ueberzug instead of w3m-img and your previews should work pretty much on every terminal.
st will handle color emoji when you install libxft-bgra from AUR on Arch (or arch-based distros).
The only downside to Termite I have encountered is that it doesn't come packaged by default in some popular distros (i.e. Ubuntu), probably because it uses a modified version of libvte. Not a problem in Arch, but can be annoying if you're a distro nomad (i.e. your work forces you to use Ubuntu on a work laptop)
That said it is still my terminal emulator of choice.
I've been using URxvt and it supports a lot more unicode characters than what was shown in this video. Only characters that didn't render were from the Runes and Ethiopian set, which is probably due to me not having all the font packages.
Hey DT a video for "bc" the command line calculator
For urxvt etxists a addon to support tabs.
Or you can use tabbed from suckless. tmux is also a way to get more tabs, with tmux you can even run your programs when you log out. I use st with tabbed and it works for me.
Great comparison, I now think of patching st with emotji support to use telegram.
you just sold me on using termite, was going to use ST because DWM has it as default terminal, but i think termite is good enough, i dont really need to configure my terminal to heavily so termite will be great
A Georgian here. Good to see the letters of my beautiful Georgian alphabet in your video!
The executable size really doesn't matter. I (believe) alacrity is written in rust-lang whereas the others are all variants of C, so the other terminals are probably dynamically linked whereas alacrity is probably static linked -- thus it'll have the largest binary. Even if they were all linked the same way, maybe it would still be the largest, but the whole debate doesn't really matter that much anyway when you're talking programs that small.
I use Sakura. I think its pretty nice
xterm was one of my favorites. There is nothing minimal with xterm, really. It has extensive menus, which at least in ubuntu can be had by using ctrl + mouse buttons. You can change font size with the menu, down to something called noseprint. meaning it is so small it cannot be read. I guess you could start a command that takes a long time to complete, that has copious output, use noseprint font to see if the command is completed. It has terminal log files, and reverse video, meaning white letters on black background, my favorite. After using that, gnome-terminal is okay, but not quite as good as xterm.
What is memory usage of those terminals?
I will never understand why people use transparency in their terminals.
Can't disagree about Urxvt. It's the only terminal I've used, and it's been no walk in the park - I've fallen into the rut of: it's already config'd. Time to try something new, and let painful.
I can't be the only one using st without any patches... all the "missing features" relevant to me are already provided by tmux (which I always run in every terminal window anyway)
Are terminal emulators good beginner tool to learn bash and the basics of the linus terminal? Or is it meant for something else? I have a crappy laptop that in no way could run a virtual machine and I don’t like the idea of fiddling around with a real operating system. It’s nice to just be able to start over when something goes wrong and try stuff out. Is there an emulator/simulator like this?
What about Kitty?
Kitty is way less than minimal than the 5 he mentioned today, but I use it and really enjoy it. Mainly for the diff kitten to display two column diffs in terminal.
25:52 "Lines of Code" count is a plausible measure for developers (not modders!) which indicates the ease of maintainability of that software and therefore the higher probability of getting updates, fixes and feature extensions faster and at lower costs! And also it's a joy to work on 'em. The intelligence of creating the same thing simpler is also respectable.
I love Cool Retro Term
Minimal or not , IMHO, kitty all my life!
I use tilix by default, and st is my backup
And I know, tilix is not lightweight or fast
@@x3mboy Or maintained? Or did they find someone to take over.
@@xthebumpx last commit was 10 days ago, so I don't get what you're talking about github.com/gnunn1/tilix/
@@x3mboy I guess unmaintained isn't exactly the right word. More like maintenance mode. github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1700
Derek, why are you `$ cat file.txt | less` instead of `$ less file.txt` ?
Why does this bother you? I do that too sometimes, it's just the flow, hey let's look at this file, cat bla, oh wait that's kind of big, let's pipe it into less.
Definitely unerstand 'no transparency on temrinal' because for me... that kills readability and once you start fuckign with readability? You remove the entire POINT of the terminal.
How does he have a clean terminal look without the box surrounding it
I am sad for termite :(
(It is no longer in development)
U r right DT, Alacritty doesn't support font ligatures.
I use Kitty mainly because of that. By the way Kitty is very nice but not minimal
Hey Derek could you do something simillar to this for FileMangers aswell?
Maybe. ;)
You converted me to an Alacritty user with your video a while back. Great terminal emulator!
The gnome-terminal and xfce4-terminal as far as I have seen the refresh rate is not as high as st or xterm. But unlike gnome-terminal xfce4-terminal does support image preview using w3m in vifm.
Just use terminator. It does everything you would ever want a terminal emulator to do and it’s super easy to configure.
Well said. I agree 100%.
Isn't Unicode rendering depended on a font?
It is not only about terminal emulator you are using, but also about font. For me, urxvt, termite and st renders everything the same with errors in chinese, ethiopian and runes. Everything else is alright with DejaVu font.
I use alacritty for ranger. Better image support but termite for everything else. I've been on and off with st but is just buggy as hell when it comes to neovim.
Who needs tabbed terminals when you've got programs like tmux? XD
Great video as always ;)
st is the king
Termite and st supported the Greek (and ancient Greek) very well.
I watched this video couple of months ago and thought hmm 🤔 Urxvt is this bad,lets see.
Installed and configured it to my liking.
Can confirm that it supports every character, unicode, emoji.
Just use the proper hint, alias, and pixelsize. Because sometimes if you don't configure proper pixelsize for the specific font it just doesn't work then.
The only thing urxvt doesn't have is Ligature support which I really like so I switched to kitty for Ligature, tabs and splits.
Kitty pretty bloated but I use urxvt as a backup terminal.
Clipgrab is safe to use?