So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.

Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!

  • I’ve used GNOME’s terminal, Konsole, kitty, st, cool-retro-term, Alacritty, foot, and Wezterm.

    The things I want from a terminal emulator are:

    • Ligatures
    • Customisability
    • Icon support / good font management
    • High-ish performance

    Wezterm is afaik the only one with all of those.

    Konsole is actually a pretty good terminal emulator, its big downside is that it looks horribly out-of-place in anything other than Plasma. So as long as you stay on Plasma, Konsole is a good choice. If you ever move to a WM or something, I recommend foot or Wezterm.

    Alacritty has some degree of customisability, Konsole has more, but either way it’s nothing when compared to Wezterm. It is really fast though!

    The thing that skews the duel in favour of Konsole for me is the ligature support. I use neovim for programming and we all know code ligatures are a godsend, so ligature support in the terminal is very much a thing that I want.