Over the years, I use different terminal emulator. Each has their own pros and cons. This is a summary of my experience.

Gnome Terminal

First terminal emulator that I use. Comes pre-installed on ubuntu, my first linux distro. At this point, I don’t really know about customizing terminal emulator and shell. Mainly used to install or configure system. Has everything I need out of the box (at that point). No obvious cons for my usage. No longer use it since I don’t like gnome DE.

Terminator

My first 3rd party terminal that I install manually. My favorite features is how to manage multiple pane. The hotkey is comfortable and I try to replicate it on other terminal (mostly unsuccessfull). Not really beatiful in term of appearance. Main reason why I abandon this terminal.

iTerm2

I consider this as the default terminal emulator for MacOS. Still use it and don’t see compelling reason to change to other terminal (for now).

Kitty

My first terminal that use gpu acceleration. Looks beautiful, fast, and comfortable keyboard shortcut. I abandone this terminal since it PITA to work on remote server (with ssh). There’s workaround for it but I’m no longer interested on it.

Alacritty

My replacement for kitty, and soon I regret this decision. Lacks features such as clickable url, tab, and pane (IIRC). This is the main motivation I learn of tmux. I give up on this setup since to broke color scheme and I can’t fix it.

xfce4-terminal

Xfce if my desktop environment of choice when I migrate to manjaro linux after ubuntu abandon Unity DE. I still use it on NixOS even though I mixed it with i3wm. Since I start using tiling window manager feature for tab/pane is not so important for me. Altough it is kinda PITA when opening new terminal it default to home instead into current directory.

Konsole

The default terminal for steamdeck since it use KDE plasma. Don’t really like the visual aspect of this terminal. Configuration via gui (I don’t like it), can’t get rid of some toolbar/menu. This might be my least favorite terminal I’ve used.

WezTerm

My current terminal on steamdeck. Still exploring.

Windows Terminal

This might be my favorite terminal in term of appearance. Unfortunately it on windows, something that I abandon not long ago.

Ghostty

Still waiting to be available on nixpkgs or flatpak.