Shell, Xterm, gnome-terminal, Konsole Introduction

What is a shell?

Simply put, the shell is a small program that can accept commands from the keyboard and send them to the operating system, and then the system executes. In the past, this was the only interactive operation available on computers that had UNIX installed. Now, you can use a graphical interface to enter the command line, such as the shell.

On most Linux computers, there is a Bourne called Bash (Bash is a shorthand for the Again shell, an upgrade of an early shell written by Steve Bourne. ), which acts as a shell role. There are often several shells available on a Linux computer, such as Ksh, tcsh, and zsh.

What are Xterm, gnome-terminal, Konsole and the like?

Typical Linux systems typically contain a variety of terminal emulators, like XTerm, RXVT, Konsole, KVT, Gnome-terminal, Nxterm, and Eterm.

The following is the result of the display based on the htop command:

Gnome Terminal

For GNOME users, GNOME terminal is obviously installed by default. In other words, it is part of the system. Like other terminal programs listed, it supports color text, diverse themes, transparency, mouse interaction, and multi-tagging. This terminal supports multiple users, so you can try different settings without affecting the current configuration, or you can set different configurations for different tasks. Gnome terminal supports linked clicks, which cannot be discarded after it has been used.

As a component of GNOME, the style of its title bar is consistent with the GTK theme, as does the rest of the system, and, like most GNOME components, the default terminal follows the GPL v3 protocol.

Guake

Guake the first of the few terminals with a "dropdown"-style interface, pressing the hotkey and pulling down the content will be explicit at the top of the screen. Guake and other style of the terminal with a drop-down style interface in the quake also, out of the 90 's nostalgia, can be in this way to relive my favorites.

Among the many features of Guake, it comes with a large number of themes, including solarized dark and tomorrow night. It has enough configuration items to meet all the requirements, the default hot recommendation (F12 boot, F11 fullscreen). Guake can be found on GitHub, based on GPLv2.

Konsole

Konsole is the default terminal emulator that comes with KDE. As a KDE component, it provides embedded terminals for many other KDE applications, including Konqueror,kate,kdevelop. Its functionality is similar to the GNOME default terminal. If you do not like the screen display scale or tmux of the terminal, it also provides the split terminal function. Konsole based on GPL2 protocol

Terminator

Terminator is similar to the Gnome terminal in many places, as well as the Konsole, which excels at splitting the terminal and displaying multiple terminals in a single window. Also cross-platform, if you want to experience on Mac,windows and Linux, it may be a good choice. It also has some pretty features including text and URL drag-and-drop features, well-designed vertical scrolling features, tab handling (many programmers need this), automatic logging, etc. It can also gracefully handle UTF-8 characters. Terminator is based on GPL2 open source.

Tilda

Tilda is another drop-down jitter style (Quake-style) terminal emulator designed for GTK, whose name is taken from the tilde key (Tilda), and the default tilde key calls the Thor Hammer terminal. The default interface for Tilda is small, with no window caption, border, or anything, but you can set it in preferences when you need to change the style. It has a large number of features, from setting the key bindings, setting the default size and color, scrolling settings, and more parameters. Tilda is based on GPL2 open source.

Xterm

If it feels xterm it's old, yes, because it's really old. Xterm was born in 1984, Xterm is the default terminal emulator for the X Window System and needs to avoid any graphics toolkit, otherwise it may appear on your window manager. But this minimalist approach also has a corresponding lack of features; This is a very simple terminal. However, there is still a place for a very small linux,xterm with a graphics system. Xterm is based on the MIT license.

Yakuake

Yakuake is another drop-down terminal emulator, which is part of the KDE family. Abbreviation "again a Kuake series Yakuake can actually be seen as a front-end konsole (mentioned above), and many of its characteristics are similar. If you like the Konsole but also like the dithering style, Yakuake is a good choice. Yakuake based on GPL2.

Reference:

Https://www.oschina.net/translate/top-open-source-terminal-emulators (the above content is transferred from this article, after a lot of changes in the late)

Shell, Xterm, Gnome-terminal, Konsole introduction (GO)