Linux

Cool Retro Term unless your actually running ELKS on an 8086 or happen to be reading this off a VT05 attached to a PDP-11.

Anything is fine unless you're using the terminal very heavily. Almost all of my workflow is within the terminal so I want everything to be as fast as possible. I want a minimal, low config, fast terminal that has the exact same behavior when using the same config on Linux and MacOS (I know, fuck me, I have to use it for work). And those are Alacritty and Ghostty. I hate Alacritty's horrible icon so I use Ghostty.

If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn't have all that fancy stuff that I don't need (and that takes up cpu cycles).

I have determined that foot is best for me personally, like alacritty and a couple others, it is very barebones. No tabs or anything like that without tmux. But it doesn't rely on GPU acceleration and is just as fast (or faster) than my experience using GPU accelerated terminals. Easy to configure and since it doesn't have the GPU requirements it works on old hardware like a dream. Only possible issue is that it is wayland only but since that is all I like to use it is perfect.

I find a lot like ghostty and wezterm try to include too many features. All I need a terminal emulator to be is a terminal emulator. But then a lot of these then add tabs, build in multiplexers & more and it is more bloated than I like a simple utility to be. Additionally, I don't need native tabs as a lot I do in the terminal uses SSH so it is easier just to use tmux/zilji and not have to manage it as much.

Surprised that there's so few drop-down terminals being mentioned; I use Tilda but I guess they are all fine as long as they work on one's distro config. It's so handy to always have the console locked and loaded invisibly, but toggled by the press of a button.

Linux vtty forever! Can't cat data into the framebuffer when your desktop is getting in the way!!

Jk I use gnome terminal for everything, or whatever default is available. It's quite amazing that most of them handle all but the most niche terminal features these days.

When I need to install a terminal emulator for some reason I always go for urxvt.. but it is pretty terrible (it's a great vt but mouse interaction is clunky and graphics are old school) compared to pretty much everything else.

The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you're a serious terminal user.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such

I think that's a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don't understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.

Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)

Konsole, because it fits in nicely with Plasma (as you would expect) and does everything I need a terminal to do.

I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don't know about.

Are you serious? It's just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I'm mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don't need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can't imagine what other features may I need.

I use xfce4-terminal, lxterminal is also good for the same reasons. The nice thing about them is that their configs are very stable (this can be a bit of an issue with KDE, e.g. I recently had to redo my editor themes for Kate because the old ones weren't compatible anymore), and they save system resources by letting all terminals run in one process. Running terminal windows in separate processes might protect you from crashes, but even though I use terminals heavily I just never have terminal crashes. And they're simpler to configure than e.g. urxvt.

kitty. The ssh kitten is enough reason to use it. I work ob a lot of different systems that require OTP. Using the ssh kitten I can type the OTP once and can spawn new terminals that ssh and cd to the remote direvtory without logging in again. Obviosly the tabs and window panes are are a must too. There's tons of other useful features that I like, like using hints to select nunbers, filenames, urls, etc in the terminal output.

Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.

Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I'd install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I'll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.

Alacritty, one of the first rust based terminals. Fast, simple config. Had no problems. Foot as a second if you want an alternative.

You don't really need anything fancy, but... I use Kitty because why not make things pretty

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.

OP, to be frank, descriptions like "general terminal stuff" and "nothing terribly fancy" are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you're (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.

what do you folks use

Ptyxis

and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.

I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don't need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn't have this really handy theme switching feature.

That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn't as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.

i just use xterm. it has proper unicode support now and is very lightweight. or maybe urxvt if i need more features.

on termux where xterm doesn't run i use st instead, it needs some source patching (very barebones) but it works pretty well.

Ghostty 👻

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.

I'm using st with tmux. It's in written in c, simple configuration can be done by editing the header file(s). More complex customization (such as visual bell or transparency) can be done via patch files.

Not the most beginner friendly terminal but super light weight and fast.

I was tinkering with ollama+deepseek and trying to integrate it into my bash functions, but gave up, because i could not supress that stupid "thinking..." prompt. Found it easyer to just have a browser window open (switching windows can become muscle memory in tiling wms like i3/sway or dwm).

I like guake, or yakuake.. they are inspired by the console in Quake. F9 drops it down and hides it. Works for what i need it to. I'm just a guy who recently ditched windows, not a power user.