Top 10 Terminal Emulators for Linux (With Extra Features or Amazing Looks)

By default, all Linux distributions already come pre-installed with a terminal application or terminal emulator (correct technical term). Of course, depending on the desktop environment, it will look and feel different.

Here’s the thing about Linux. You are not restricted to what your distribution provides. You can opt for an alternative application of your choice. Terminal is no different. There are several impressive terminal emulators that offer unique features for a better user experience or for better looks.

Here, I will be compiling a list of such interesting terminal applications that you can try on your Linux distribution.

Awesome Terminal Emulators for Linux

The list is in no particular order of ranking. I’ve tried to list the interesting ones first followed by some of the most popular terminal emulators. Also, I have highlighted the key features for every terminal emulator mentioned, choose what you prefer.

1. Terminator

Key Highlights:

• Multiple GNOME terminals in one window

Terminator is decently popular terminal emulator which is still being maintained (moved from Launchpad to GitHub).

It basically provides you multiple GNOME terminals in one window. You can easily group and re-group terminal windows with the help of it. You may feel like using a tiling window manager but with some restrictions.

Gnome Terminator

How to install Terminator?

For Ubuntu-based distros, all you have to do is type in the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt install terminator

You should find it in most of Linux distributions through the default repositories. But, if you need help installing, go through the GitHub page.

2. Guake Terminal

Key Highlights:

• Tailored for quick access to terminal on GNOME
• Works fast and does not need a lot of system resource
• Shortcut key to access

Guake terminal was originally inspired by an FPS game Quake. Unlike some other terminal emulators, it works as an overlay on every other active window.

All you have to do is summon the emulator using a shortcut key (F12) and it will appear from the top. You get customize the width or position of the emulator, but most of the users should be fine with the default setting.

Not just as a handy terminal emulator, it offers a ton of features like ability to restore tabs, having multiple tabs, color-coding each tab, and more. You can check out my separate article on Guake to learn more.

Guake

How to install Guake Terminal?

Guake is available in the default repositories for most of the Linux distributions. You can refer to its official installation instructions.

Or if you’re using Debian-based distro, just type in the following command:

sudo apt install guake

3. Tilix Terminal

Key Highlights:

• Tiling feature
• Drag and drop support
• Drop down Quake mode

Tilix Terminal offers a similar drop-down experience that you find with Guake – but it also lets you have multiple terminal windows in tiling mode.

This is particularly useful if you do not have tiling windows by default in your Linux distribution and have a big screen to work on multiple terminal windows without needing to switching between workspaces.

We’ve already covered it before separately if you’re curious to learn more about it.

Tilix

How to install Tilix?

Tilix is available in the default repositories for most of the distributions. If you’re using Ubuntu-based distro, simply type in:

sudo apt install tilix

Recommended Read:

5 Tweaks to Customize the Look of Your Linux Terminal

Want to beautify your Linux terminal and give it a different look? Here are a few ways you can customize your terminal.

4. Hyper

Key Highlights:

• Terminal built on HTML/CSS/JS
• Electron-based
• Cross-platform
• Extensive configuration options

Hyper is yet another interesting terminal emulator that is built on web technologies. It doesn’t provide a unique user experience, but looks quite different and offers a ton of customization options.

It also supports installing themes and plugins to easily customize the appearance of the terminal. You can explore more about it in their GitHub page.

Hyper

How to install Hyper?

Hyper is not available in the default repositories. However, you can find both .deb and .rpm packages available to install through their official website.

If you’re new, read through the articles to get help using deb files and using RPM files.

5. Tilda

Key Highlights:

• Drop down terminal
• Search bar integrated

Tilda is another drop-down GTK-based terminal emulator. Unlike some others, it focuses on providing an integrated search bar which you can toggle and also lets you customize many things.

You can also set hotkeys for quick access or a certain action. Functionally, it is quite impressive. However, visually, I don’t like how the overlay behaves and does not support drag and drop as well. You might give it a try though.

Tilda

How to install Tilda?

For Ubuntu-based distros, you can simply type in:

sudo apt install tilda

You can refer to its GitHub page for installation instructions on other distributions.

6. eDEX-UI

Key Highlights:

• Sci-Fi Look
• Cross-platform
• Theme options to customize
• Supports Multiple terminal tabs

If you’re not looking particularly for a terminal emulator to help you get your work done faster, eDEX-UI is something that you must try.

It is absolutely a beautiful terminal emulator for sci-fi fans and for users who just want their terminal to look unique. In case you didn’t know, it is heavily inspired from the TRON legacy movie.

Not just the design or the interface, overall, it offers you a unique user experience that you will enjoy. It also lets you customize the terminal. It does require a significant amount of system resource if you’re planning to try it.

You might want to check our dedicated article on eDEX-UI to know more about it and the steps to install it.

eDEX-UI

How to install eDEX-UI?

You can find it in some of the repositories that include AUR. In either case, you can grab a package available for your Linux distribution (or an AppImage file) from its GitHub releases section.

Recommended Read:

5 Tweaks to Customize the Look of Your Linux Terminal

Want to beautify your Linux terminal and give it a different look? Here are a few ways you can customize your terminal.

7. Cool Retro Terminal

Key Highlights:

• Retro Theme
• Animation/Effects to tweak

Cool Retro Terminal is a unique terminal emulator that provides you with a look of a vintage cathode ray tube monitor.

If you’re looking for some extra-functionality terminal emulator, this may disappoint you. However, it is impressive to note that it is decently light on resources and allows you to customize the color, effects, and fonts.

Cool Retro Theme

How to install Cool Retro Terminal?

You can find all the installation instructions for major Linux distributions in its GitHub page. For Ubuntu-based distros, you can type in the following in the terminal:

sudo apt install cool-retro-term

8. Alacritty

Key Highlights:

• Cross-platform
• Extension options and focuses on integration

Alacritty is an interesting open-source cross-platform terminal emulator. Even though it is considered as something in “beta” phase, it still works.

It aims to provide you extensive configuration options while keeping the performance in mind. For instance, the ability to click through a URL using a keyboard, copying text to a clipboard, and performing a search using “Vi” mode may intrigue you to try it.

You can explore its GitHub page for more information.

Alacritty

How to install Alacritty?

Alacritty can be installed using package managers says the official GitHub page, but I couldn’t find it in the default repository or synaptic package manager on Linux Mint 20.1.

You can follow the installation instructions to set it up manually if you want to try it.

9. Konsole

Key Highlights:

• KDE’s terminal
• Lightweight and customizable

If you’re not a newbie, this probably needs no introduction. Konsole is the default terminal emulator for KDE desktop environments.

Not just limited to that, it also comes integrated with a lot of KDE apps as well. Even if you’re using some other desktop environment, you can still try Konsole. It is a lightweight terminal emulator with a host of features.

You can have multiple tabs and multiple grouped windows as well. Lot of customization options to change the look and feel of the terminal emulator as well.

Konsole

How to install Konsole?

For Ubuntu-based distros and most other distributions, you can install it using the default repository. With Debian-based distros, you just need to type this in the terminal:

sudo apt install konsole

10. GNOME Terminal

Key Highlights:

• GNOME’s terminal
• Simple yet customizable

If you’re utilizing any Ubuntu-based GNOME distribution, it already comes baked in. It may not be as customizable as Konsole (depends on what you’re doing) but it lets you configure most of the important aspects of the terminal easily.

Overall, it offers a good user experience and an easy-to-use interface with essential functions.

I’ve also covered a tutorial to customize your GNOME terminal if you’re curious.

How to install GNOME Terminal?

If you’re not using GNOME desktop but want to try it out, you can easily install it through the default repositories.

For Debian-based distros, here’s what you need to type in the terminal:

sudo apt install gnome-terminal

Wrapping Up

There are several terminal emulators available out there. You can try anything you like if you’re looking for a different user experience. However, if you’re aiming for a stable and productive experience, you need to test the terminal emulators before you can rely on them.

For most of the users, the default terminal emulators should be good enough. But, if you’re looking for quick access (Quake Mode) or Tiling feature or multiple windows in a terminal, feel free to try out the options mentioned above.

What’s your favorite terminal emulator on Linux? Did I miss listing your favorite? Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments down below.

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Use gdu for a Faster Disk Usage Checking in Linux Terminal

There are two popular ways to check disk usage in Linux terminal: du command and df command. The du command is more for checking the space used by a directory and the df command gives you the disk utilization on filesystem level.

There are more friendly ways to see the disk usage in Linux with graphical tools like GNOME Disks. If you are confined to the terminal, you can use a TUI tool like ncdu to get the disk usage information with a sort of graphical touch.

Gdu: Disk usage checking in Linux terminal

Gdu is such a tool written in Go (hence the ‘g’ in gdu). Gdu developer has benchmark tests to show that it is quite fast for disk usage checking, specifically on SSDs. In fact, gdu is intended primarily for SSDs though it can work for HDD as well.

If you use the gdu command without any options, it shows the disk usage for the current directory you are in.

Since it has terminal user interface (TUI), you can navigate through directories and disk using arrows. You can also sort the result by file names or size.

Here’s how to do that:

• Up arrow or k to move cursor up
• Down arrow or j to move cursor down
• Enter to select directory / device
• Left arrow or h to go to parent directory
• Use d to delete the selected file or directory
• Use n to sort by name
• Use s to sort by size
• Use c to sort by items

You’ll notice some symbols before some file entries. Those have specific meaning.

• ! means an error occurred while reading the directory.
• . means an error occurred while reading a subdirectory, size may not be correct.
• @ means file is a symlink or socket.
• H means the file was already counted (hard link).
• e means directory is empty.

To see the disk utilization and free space for all mounted disks, use the option d:

gdu -d

It shows all the details in one screen:

Sounds like a handy tool, right? Let’s see how to get it on your Linux system.

Installing gdu on Linux

Gdu is available for Arch and Manjaro users through the AUR. I presume that as an Arch user, you know how to use AUR.

It is included in the universe repository of the upcoming Ubuntu 21.04 but chances are that you are not using it at present. In that case, you may install it using Snap through it may seem like a lot of snap commands:

snap install gdu-disk-usage-analyzer
snap connect gdu-disk-usage-analyzer:mount-observe :mount-observe
snap connect gdu-disk-usage-analyzer:system-backup :system-backup
snap alias gdu-disk-usage-analyzer.gdu gdu

You may also find the source code on its release page:

Source code download for gdu

I am more used to of using du and df commands but I can see some Linux users might like gdu. Are you one of them?

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Kooha is a Nascent Screen Recorder for GNOME With Wayland Support

There is not a single decent screen recording software for Linux that supports Wayland display server.

GNOME’s built-in screen recorder is probably the rare (and lone) one that works if you are using Wayland. But that screen recorder has no visible interface and features you expect in a standard screen recording software.

Thankfully, there is a new application in development that provides a bit more feature than GNOME screen recorder and works okay-ish on Wayland.

Meet Kooha: a new screen recorder for GNOME desktop

Kooha is an application in the nascent stage of development. It can be used in GNOME and it is built with GTK and PyGObject. In fact, it utilizes the same backend as the GNOME’s built-in screen recorder.

Here are the features Kooha has:

• Record the entire screen or a selected area
• Works on both Wayland and Xorg display servers
• Records audio from microphone along with the video
• Option to include or omit mouse pointer
• Can add a delay of 5 or 10 seconds before start the recording
• Supports recording in WebM and MKV formats
• Allows to change the default saving location
• Supports a few keyboard shortcuts

My experience with Kooha

I was contacted by its developer, Dave Patrick and since I desperately want a good screen recorder, I immediately went on to try it.

At present, Kooha is only available to install via Flatpak. I installed Flatpak and when I tried to use it, nothing was recorded. I had a quick email discussion with Dave and he told me that it was due to a bug with GNOME screen recorder in Ubuntu 20.10.

You can imagine my desperation for a screen recorder with Wayland support that I upgraded my Ubuntu to the beta version of 21.04.

The screen recording worked in 21.04 but it could still not record the audio from the microphone.

There are a few more things that I noticed and didn’t work smoothly to my liking.

For example, while recording the counter remains visible on the screen and is included in the recording. I wouldn’t want that in a video tutorial. You wouldn’t like to see that either I guess.

Another thing is about multi-monitor support. There is no option to exclusively select a particular screen. I connect with two external monitors and by default it recorded all three of them. Setting a capture region could be used but dragging it to exact pixels of a screen is a time-consuming task.

There is no option to set the frame rate or encoding that comes with Kazam or other legacy screen recorders.

Installing Kooha on Linux (if you are using GNOME)

Please make sure to enable Flatpak support on your Linux distribution. It only works with GNOME for now so please check which desktop environment you are using.

Use this command to add Flathub to your Flatpak repositories list:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

And then use this command to install it:

flatpak install flathub io.github.seadve.Kooha

You may run it from the menu or by using this command:

flatpak run io.github.seadve.Kooha

Conclusion

Kooha is not perfect but considering the huge void in the Wayland domain, I hope that the developers work on fixing the issues and adding more features. This is important considering Ubuntu 21.04 is switching to Wayland by default and some other popular distros like Fedora and openSUSE already use Wayland by default.

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Dual Booting Ubuntu and Windows With a SSD and a HDD

Dual booting Ubuntu and Windows is not that complicated and I have covered it in detailed tutorial in the past. Recently, I also wrote about dual booting on a Bitlocker encrypted Windows system.

And yet here I am talking about it again. Why? Because the scenario is slightly different and several It’s FOSS readers have asked questions about this particular scenario.

Here’s the scenario: you got a new computer. It comes with a SSD with limited disk space like 120 GB and an additional HDD with 500 GB or 1 TB disk space. This is usually the scene with gaming laptops where large disk space matters for storing game files but SSD is required for faster boot and computing experience. 1 TB SSD would increase the system price a lot and hence this particular combination of SSD and HDD.

Now, if you want to dual boot on a system with two disks, you may get confused about where should you be installing Linux.

You have three options:

1. Install Linux completely on the SSD. You’ll get full advantage of SSD speed, but then you will have only a limited disk space.
2. Install Linux completely on the HDD. You’ll have plenty of disk space, but Linux will boot slower, and you won’t get the SSD advantage.
3. A compromise between SSD and HDD. You keep the root (and thus swap and boot) on SSD and you put your Home directory on HDD. This way, you boot faster into Linux and you have plenty of disk space for your personal documents and downloads.

There is also a fourth option here. You keep root as well as home on SSD. And you make a partition on the HDD and then soft link it to your Music, Videos and Downloads folder. This way, application-specific files like browser caching utilize the SSD and other big files stay on HDD. But this could be complicated to set specially with fast boot enabled on Windows which would mean special efforts to auto-mount the partitions.

I recommend going with the third option for dual booting on separate hard drives and this is what I am going to show you in this tutorial.

Dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on a system with SSD and HDD

I have used an Acer Predator gaming laptop in this tutorial to install Ubuntu alongside Windows. The tutorial should work for other hardware manufacturers and Linux distributions.

I advise reading through all the steps first and then follow the tutorial on your system.

Prerequisite

Here are the things you need in this tutorial:

• A computer that comes preinstalled with Windows 10 and has both an SSD and an HDD.
• A USB key (pen drive or USB drive) of at least 4 GB in size and no data on it.
• Internet connection (for downloading Ubuntu ISO image and live USB creating tool).
• Optional: External USB disk for making back up of your data.
• Optional: Windows recovery disk (if you encounter any major boot issues, it could be fixed).

Step 1: Make backup of your data

Since you’ll be dealing with disk partitions, it will be wise to make a copy of your important files on an external disk. This is optional but having a backup is always a good idea.

You can use an external HDD (slower but cheaper) or SSD (faster but expensive) and copy the important files and folders on it.

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Step 2: Make disk partition for Ubuntu installation

In the Windows menu, search for disk and go to ‘Create and format hard disk partitions’.

You’ll see both SSD and HDD here. You have to shrink both SSD and HDD one by one and make some free space that will be utilized later for installing Ubuntu Linux.

Right click on the SSD and choose Shrink Volume option.

It will give you the largest possible disk partition you can make here. Don’t use it all. Leave some extra space for Windows. I have given it 30 GB which is a decent disk space for the root partition. Anything between 20 and 40 GB is a fair choice.

Repeat the process with the HDD as well. I made around 200 GB of free space for Linux. You are free to decide how much space you want to allocate to Ubuntu.

Here’s what the final disk scenario looks like for my system. 29.3 GB free space on SSD and 195.3 GB free space on HDD.

Step 3: Download Ubuntu

Go to Ubuntu’s website and download the ISO file. If you need torrents, you can find it under the ‘alternative downloads’.

Download Ubuntu ISO Image

Step 4: Create bootable Ubuntu USB

You can easily create bootable Ubuntu USB in Windows, Linux and macOS. Since the focus here is on Windows, you can use a Windows specific tool like Rufus. Etcher is also a good tool in this regard.

Download Rufus from its website.

Download Rufus

Plug in your USB. Make sure it doesn’t have any important data because it will be formatted.

Run the Rufus tool. It automatically identifies the plugged in USB but double check it anyway. Then browse to the location of the downloaded ISO image and ensure that it uses GPT partitioning scheme and UEFI target system.

Hit the start button and wait for the process to complete. Once you have the live Ubuntu USB ready, the next step is to boot from it.

Step 5: Boot from the live USB

You may choose to access the boot settings when the system starts by pressing F2/F10/F12 button but a more robust way is go through Windows.

In the Windows menu, search for UEFI and then click on ‘Change advanced startup options’:

Under the Advanced startup option, click on Restart now button.

On the next screen, click on ‘Use a device’:

Recognize the USB disk with its name and size. It may also be displayed as EFI USB Device.

Now it will power off your system and reboot into the disk you chose which should be the live USB disk. You should see a screen like this:

Step 6: Installing Ubuntu Linux

Now that you have booted from the live USB, you may start the installation procedure. The first few steps are simple. You choose the language and keyboard.

• 

  Choose your language

• 

  Choose keyboard layout

On the next screen, choose Normal installation. No need to download updates or install third-party software just yet. You may do it after installation completes.

After some time you’ll see the Installation type screen. Here, opt for ‘Something else‘ option:

You should see the free space you had created earlier on the next screen. Select the free space created on SSD (you can guess by its size if nothing else) and click on the + sign to use this free space.

By default, it will take the entire free space which is a good thing. Keep the partition type primary.

What you need to change is the file system type to Ext4 and mount point to / (/ means root in Linux).

Now, select the other free space on the HDD and click the + sign.

This time choose Home as the mount point. Partition remains primary and file type ext4.

You don’t need to worry about ‘Device for boot loader installation’. You have a pre-installed Windows UEFI system. You should have an EFI partitioning (ESP) already (for me it’s 100 MB partitioning with type efi). The Ubuntu installer is intelligent and can automatically detect this partition and use it for Grub bootloader.

This is the final partitioning scheme for my system. If everything looks good, hit the Install Now button.

Things are pretty straightforward from here. Select a timezone.

Enter a username, computer’s name, i.e. hostname and an easy to remember password.

Now wait for like 7-8 minutes for the installation to finish.

Restart the system when the installation finishes.

Restart after installation completes

You’ll be asked to remove the USB disk. Remove the disk and press enter.

Remove USB and press enter

If things go right, you should see the black or purple grub screen with option to boot into Ubuntu and Windows.

You can choose the operating system from the grub screen

That’s it. You can now enjoy both Windows and Linux on the same system with SSD and HDD. Nice, isn’t it?

I hope this tutorial was helpful to you. If you still have questions or facing any issues, let me know in the comment section, and I’ll try to help you out.

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