gemini://gem.hexandcounter.org/gemlog/posts/terminal.gmi

In Linux I think I always just used what came with the OS. On Lubuntu it is something called lxterminal. It works fine, I guess. I am not sure what to look for in a terminal emulator. There was some setting I was looking for the other day, but could not find, so I guess there is something that is missing, but I can't even remember what it was.

For some time last century I owned a real hardware terminal. A VT-220-something. The university was getting rid of them and I managed to pick one up. I used it as a bedside terminal, connected by a serial cable to my Linux desktop a few meters away at my desk. I do not remember using it much. That was not really a terminal emulator of course, as it was an actual terminal, but it sounds like the kind of thing I imagine a terminal (emulator) hipster would have?

When I used a Mac I spent more time worrying about what terminal emulator I used. Not that I remember what was wrong with the default one, but like many others I switched to one called iTerm2. I also bought a closed-source terminal emulator called Cathode. Cathode did not really do anything significantly better or worse than other emulators, but it could emulate the look of old monitors. I sometimes ran it in full-screen on a Macbook and it looked great, like a 1990's PC CRT. It just made it more fun to work in the terminal. Not sure if it is still around. The hits I get when searching all look suspicious or outdated.

What I have done for a few years now, both in terminals and in my Emacs windows, is to use a font based on a 1980's PC VGA BIOS font. My screen, usually running a terminal or Emacs in fullscreen (because of tiling window manager) looks more or less like the MS-DOS environment I grew up with. At least it does to me. Happy memories. A coworker looking over my shoulder a few months ago ruined it. He remarked at how I had configured my Linux to look like a Windows cmd window. Ugh. I never even thought of that, but it does! Maybe I will have to think of some other way to configure my terminal to look nice in some way.

Work environment details like the above are underrated. But what particular emulator I use never felt that important to me. As long as I can pick what font to use it is probably good enough. But I like the ones that let me run multiple terminals in tabs in the same window. I never have more than one terminal window these days, but usually that single window has 5+ terminal tabs in it, and usually each tab runs tmux with a number of open shells.

Re: Are You a Terminal Emulator Hipster?