Terminals have a special place in computing history, surviving along with the command line in the face of the rising ubiquity of graphical interfaces. Terminal emulators have replaced hardware terminals, which themselves were upgrades from punched cards and toggle-switch inputs. Modern distributions now ship with a surprising variety of terminal emulators. While some people may be happy with the default terminal provided by their desktop environment, others take great pride at using exotic software for running their favorite shell or text editor. But as we’ll see in this two-part series, not all terminals are created equal: they vary wildly in terms of functionality, size, and performance.
Seems like terminal emulators is one app category where *nix especially has a distinct advantage over Windows. The only decent free one I know of on Windows (and hence the only one I’m allowed to use at work) is Putty (or Kitty if you like), which is okay for what it is, but a bit bare bones.
I know you can use 3rd party addons to give it tabs and such, but I really wish I could use SecureCRT instead.
Well, try this one : http://ttyemulator.com/index.php?id=7
Last update to ttyemulator looks to be November 2015.
Last update of VT100 protocol : 1978
Seriously, TTYEmulator do serial and SSH, what did you expect from a “terminal” emulator ?
1978 was about the time that the VT100 was introduced.
Later terminals especially the VT220 and later were a lot more flexible in what you could get them to do.
I even wrote some bits of VT220 microcode back in the day to support some non standard languages.
The VT100 became a defacto standard. It has stood the test of time for dumb terminal operations. If it ain’t brok don’t fix it.
my favorite so far is
https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
Its the shell that cygwin uses, but targeted for WSL ( aka ubuntu for windows)
Mobaxterm is pretty badass on windows. It is free but you can pay for a license if you want to modify it to suite your own needs.
It has some limitations in the free version but I personally have never ran into them as an issue.
That’s kind of like term & tools together in a unified package. Its useful, but I find it more rare to find a good stand alone terminal that can be packaged with the tools and environment of your choice.
Cause, I have a lot of packages that have their own environment that are useful for specific use cases, and its kinda annoying to have to switch between them to get stuff done. I’m hoping WSL continues to improve, which will remove the need for the others.
What an odd thing to say.
Not if you are comparing almost any standard *nix terminal vs CMD.exe or even Powershell… or even the updated terminal in windows 10 you have to go 3rd party to get anything remotely decent.
I’m not disputing that *nix terminals are better than any that Windows provides. What I’m finding odd is the idea that it’s somehow a distinct advantage. The two systems were designed to be used in their own way, so of course one system would be more developed in one area than another system.
It’s like saying that herbivores have a distinct advantage over carnivores when it comes to eating vegetation. They’re not really competing in that space to begin with, so “advantage” is an odd way to characterize it.
Well it kind of is a distinct advantage… power users and administrators can spend quite a lot of time in a console on windows.
Windows leans on the command prompt quite a lot in some cases… more than you’d think.
Edited 2018-04-23 03:55 UTC
Thankfully the Windows terminal improved quite a bit since the Windows 10 update, and the added WSL makes me barely miss Linux at all when I use my Windows machine.
I’ve used ConsoleZ for a long time, it still gets updates: https://github.com/cbucher/console/wiki
Tilix is a better Terminator.
It is explicitly mentioned under the “Eye Candy” section.
So yes, it’s not in the actual comparison.
If you like GTK and GNOME HIG, then maybe. Otherwise …
Well, since Terminator is also using GTK …..
True but it doesn’t look like a GNOME app, nor behave like one. It’s a very minimal window with no decorations, just terminals inside terminals.
Whereas Tilix very much looks and acts like a GNOME app with a hideous bar across the top and sometimes side. Reminds me of Konsole 4.x where the “Chrome” takes up a significant portion of the window.
Well, regardless of what you think of it’s aesthetics I think it should have been part of the comparison.
I prefer Cool Retro Term!
https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx7REAQ2MY
😉
I find Tera Term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tera_Term a great alternative to Putty. There are just some devices (some Cisco SG series switches, Synology NAS) that just will not work with Putty (at least for me anyways) over a serial interface, but work just fine in Tera Term. It is not “pretty” by far, but I’d rather it work.