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Bjorn posted
Are You a Terminal Emulator Hipster?
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 The hits I get when searching all look suspicious or outdated.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.
The Oldschool PC Font Resource site
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.
tags: #linux #dos