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ROUNDUP
Hyper Cool Retro Term Yakuake Terminator Terminology
Michael
Reed
can come across as terminally serious if the only available terminal doesn’t support colour.
Terminal emulators
We all need a terminal emulator at some point to access the Linux command line. Michael Reed examines five advanced options.
HOW WE TESTED…
The first task was, of course, to install each candidate. We aimed to install the latest stable version in each case. Then it was time to configure each one, particularly in the visual realm. Everyone who uses a terminal emulator has their own take on how it should look, and we messed around with configurations to make ourselves comfortable and ensure that a wide range of options was available.
We lived with each of the terminal emulators while engaged in some text mode activities, such as compiling code and running text mode favourites such as text editor Nano and fancy-looking system monitor htop.
While we were exploring each terminal emulator, we kept going back to the documentation to make sure that it was comprehensive. There’s no point in having fancy features if you can’t figure out how to use them.
We’ve made the odd remark about performance, but generally speaking, all of these candidates offered similar speed in use.
Whenever you access the command line from a desktop environment, W you need to use a terminal emulator. Every major desktop environment comes with a basic terminal emulator, but there are other choices if you crave better looks and more features.
Yakuake takes inspiration from the terminal in the Quake series of games in that it drops down from the top of the screen when you hit a hotkey – an efficient and useful arrangement.
Cool Retro Term cranks up the nostalgia as it can simulate the look of many different types of CRT displays of yore. It looks amazing, but it’s also a perfectly good terminal emulator for serious work.
CREDIT: Zokara/Getty Images
Hyper has a cool-looking minimalist appearance, and it’s based upon the Electron toolkit and has a huge scope for customisation for those with the inclination and expertise in CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
Terminology is the terminal emulator of the Enlightenment desktop environment and has a few visual extras compared to most.
Terminator offers extensive screen-splitting features so that you can have multiple terminals within one window. It also has a lot of configuration options and great documentation.
Installation
First things first: you need to obtain the latest version and install it.
Generally, most of these tools were out of date in the Linux Mint repositories. For Hyper, we downloaded the DEB archive from the website. This worked fine, and there is also an RPM. Manually installing architecture-specific packages like this can present a problem due to updating, but once it’s installed, Hyper monitors for updates and automatically installs the latest version for you. This behaviour can be toggled off. There is an AppImage file, but that format, which does not install itself, is a different prospect for a system tool such as a terminal emulator. Hyper has an option that creates a symlink so it is in the current path, completing the initial setup.
Terminator’s main website and documentation don’t seem to contain directions for obtaining an up-to-date version. In all fairness, the GitHub page contained information on building the project from the source code or installing via the developer’s PPA. We did the latter successfully on Linux Mint, but on non-Debian/Ubuntu-based distros you may have to build from source.
The Yakuake website has links to the Snapcraft and Flathub repos, but the Snapcraft package was very out of date, so we went with Flathub. This meant Yakuake was installed to the application menus and available from all areas of the system. We didn’t run into any problems, due to Flatpak sandboxing.