I basically have the following requirements:
- Fast startup: I start the terminal from within my file manager quite often when starting external programs or directly working on command line tools so fast startup is important to me.
- Unicode/Ansi-Color support: The terminal must support unicode (utf-8 to be precise) encodings and must interpret ansi color codes.
- Searchable scrollback buffer: I want to be able to search in the output of previous commands which makes it much easier to work with command line tools.
xfce4-terminal
Since I use XFCE as my desktop environment it was clear to at least try xfce4-terminal.Pros:
- nice color schemes out of the box
- searchable unlimited scrollback buffer (Ctrl-Shift-f)
- tab support
- it is reasonable fast when using dbus to start a new window from an already running process, but the window does not always open in foreground with focus. From time to time the new terminal is in the background and I have to switch windows to access it.
- there is an option to not use existing process but then it is quite slow:
Executing
time xfce4-terminal --disable-server -x ls
takes 0.25s on my i5-3120M with 8 GB of RAM
rxvt-unicode (urxvt)
Pros:- fast:
time urxvt -e ls
takes 0.07s - supports scrollback search (M-s)
- configuration is done with x11 attributes (.Xdefaults)
Here are my x11 settings for .Xdefaults:
URxvt.foreground: #d3d7cf URxvt.background: #2e3436 URxvt.saveLines: 1000000urxvt supports Xft font rendering. You can select a Xft font as follows:
urxvt.font: xft:Misc Fixed:style=SemiCondensed:pixelsize=13
lxterminal
Pros:- reasonable fast
time lxterminal -e ls
takes 0.15s - graphical configuration and optional menu
- tab support
- no searchable scrollback buffer
gnome-terminal
Pro:- graphical configuration and optional menu
- tab support
- slow
time gnome-terminal -e ls
takes 0.3s
Other terminals
Here's a quick list of other terminals I checked:- mate-terminal: did not run without other mate components
- sakura: simple terminal
- terminology: fancy implementation but still only basic terminal support
- terminus: another simple terminal
- tilix: slow, but interesting multi-session, tiling concept. If you use screen or tmux but want a more graphical implementation, you may want to check this out.
newer (2021-02-16): Installing OpenSuse Tumbleweed on an AMD Ryzen7 laptop with NVidia graphics
older (2019-06-04): Running Doom Sigil on Linux