So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
Kitty if you have a GPU and run programs that have a lot of output (build scripts and emerge). It uses the GPU for better performance.
kitty is great, for me it’s similar to mpv: it does what it’s supposed to do, no fluff. Just straight up performance.
Kitty is great until you SSH into a machine where it’s not installed and try to use tmux or some other commandline apps
@flashgnash @Laser Connecting once with its ssh kitten resolves this by uploading appropriate terminfo files to the user’s directory.
I didn’t realise it was only once you had to use it
@flashgnash Yep, just once to transfer the terminfo files and resolve this.
The SSH kitten is pretty useful though. If you use it in combination with kitty’s --single-instance mode, you can start new kitty windows in the same SSH session without logging in again using its shared connection feature. Hugely convenient for how I work at least.
I have used it for that feature before, is there not a concern around defense in depth there though? If you’ve got a rogue program running could it not then hijack your ssh connection and infect that machine as well?
If it’s a machine you have control over you can install the terminfo. Or setting the TERM variable to something like xterm-256color when connecting, that usually works, though I haven’t tried with tmux.
I usually just change TERM to xterm but I’ve heard that isn’t a good way to do it
Also I’d rather not install stuff on every server I ssh into, I’ve installed it on test servers but wouldn’t want to do it on prod
I’ve never had issues with TERM=xterm