What is the best graphical terminal/console for Linux? [closed]

Well, I'm often tired of the basic functionalities of terminal provided as is when installing a new distribution.

What is the best console in a graphical mode?

For now, all I want to is:

  • Tabs management
  • Easy copy/paste (^C/^V support)
  • UTF-8 support
  • Should be available for both KDE/Gnome environnement

Please be argumentative, don't answer with 'my favorite is' only. Try to tell me why and which features it offers.


Solution 1:

Whatever the default is.

I touch dozens or more systems over the course of the week, where I can be logged in as any number of users. The problem is that if you go to the effort of finding, building, and customizing a particular terminal, you'll either waste a LOT of time trying to reproduce/distribute it everywhere, or you'll get annoyed that your customizations are not present or at a older/different rev than whatever your "reference" is.

For that reason and others, I use a lightly-customized screen session inside whatever the default terminal is. My .screenrc and .vimrc are available across the web with a simple wget command, which makes keeping different locations up-to-date much easier.

Now the scale of my problem might be different than yours, but this is why I work the way I do.

Solution 2:

Konsole:

  1. Tabs
  2. Configurable shortcuts (in KDE3 version, you can set it to ctrl-shift-C/V, for KDE4 it's build-in. You can not use ctrl-c in terminal, as this is the standard combination for terminating applications.
  3. UTF8
  4. Yes, its KDE app, but any decent distro these days puts a lot of effort to integrate apps from one manager in the other. I use konsole on my ubuntu box all the time w/o any problems.
  5. Configurable and pre-set "shema"s - colors, fonts, etc.
  6. Configurable Session profiles - to open a tab/session as root, midnight commander, root midnight commander, ssh.
  7. ZModem support (not that I have ever used, but it's there :) )
  8. Bookmarks
  9. Activity monitor (you may set it up to ring a bell if new line is printed after a long running process, or when it stops to output)
  10. Send input to all open sessions - if you want to trigger the same action in all open tabs/windows
  11. Detach tab to a new window
  12. Print screen
  13. Find in History
  14. Save History as file etc.

Another option could be to use "screen" with customized session in whatever terminal you end up using, even from a text console.

Solution 3:

I've found that I like Terminal (http://www.xfce.org/projects/terminal) for a couple of things:

  • ability to turn off up/down scrollbar (I always run screen in terminals, so scrollbars are just something to accidentally click on and cause problems)
  • good UTF-8 support
  • decent tab support (on for my local screen session, one for my always-on-remote-server session)

I tried some of the 'quake-like' terminals because they looked cute, but was unsatisfied by them in different ways.

FYI: Konsole has a "No Scrollback" option.