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What's the best modern terminal emulator for Windows?

22 points by pkalinowski ↗ HN
I'm slowly moving to Windows + WSL as my main development configuration.

I couldn't find satisfying iTerm 2 replacement. Currently using Fluent Terminal (https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal), but it it definitely lacks configuration options.

Can you recommend anything?

EDIT: forgot to mention, Quake-like top-down style is something I'll never resign from :)

13 comments

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yumcimil
I've been running RoyalTS as of late - integrated Keepass into itself pretty nicely. I'm a bit sceptical of their credential handling internally, but it lets you use a keepass file.

I've used Mobaxterm in the past, and it was decent. Royal TS is just a little nicer. Windows Terminal is coming along quite nicely too.

m3h
Try the new Windows Terminal. Typing in the UI feels pretty responsive. The UI is minimal; tabs, menu and the rest is the terminal screen. Configuration can be done using a JSON based config file. You can set it up to use Powerscript, bash, etc. It doesn't do the Quake style drop yet but we can always hope for more since it's still in pre-release. :)

It can be installed through the Microsoft Store.

nemesis128
The great thing is that we can launch WSL bash and even Cygwin in Windows Terminal.
bssameer
My picks would be either the new windows terminal or Fluent Terminal. Both are pretty good.
1996
mintty, by far. I'm surprised no one has recommended it yet.

The new Windows Terminal is just not ready. It's death by a thousand paper cuts.

I keep an eye on it, but here's an example from right now when I start it with msys bash which otherwise works just fine:

bash: cut: command not found

dircolors: no SHELL environment variable, and no shell type option given

# echo $SHELL

/usr/bin/bash

# which cut

/usr/bin/cut

mcswell
I'm confused. 'cut' works just fine for me in the Windows Terminal: ------- > echo $SHELL /bin/bash > echo "foo bar" | cut -f 1 -d ' ' foo ------ I'm using the WSL Ubuntu bash. Could your problem be with this 'msys' you're using?

(I'm not sure what the 'dircolors' SHELL env var is--I haven't used 'dircolors', but 'man' tells me it's a program that sets the LS_COLORS env var, not an env var itself. And it says it has a shell type option, although that seems to be limited to C-shell and Bourne shell. Or maybe you mean dircolors doesn't pay attention to the SHELL env var? Again, that sounds more like a problem with the msys bash implementation, rather than the Windows Terminal.)

rhinoceraptor
One option is to just use the Linux ecosystems' terminal emulators. To do this, you'll need a windows X11 server, I use VcXrv (choco install vcxrv).

Then, export DISPLAY=:0.0 in your .bashrc, and then you should be able to launch WSL GUI apps. You can then create a windows shortcut to call bash.exe with arguments to open whichever terminal you use.

Alternatively, Alacritty is a super minimal, GPU accelerated terminal emulator. Plus, it's written in Rust.

rococode
I enjoy using Cmder [1]. You can customize the colors and fonts, it has tabs, split panes, keyboard and mouse stuff, customizable tab names, global hotkeys, etc. I confess I'm not 100% what the Quake thing is but I'm pretty sure Cmder has that feature (it just means you get the terminal to slide down from the top of your screen with a hotkey right?) [2].

I used to be big on Linux custom stuff with i3 + termite + rofi as my main workflow but life has been much easier with Windows + WSL + Cmder haha. It also lets you run command prompt in the same UI as a new tab, which is nice in those rare cases when you need to use command prompt instead of WSL. I believe it's built on top of ConEmu [3].

[1] https://cmder.net/

[2] https://medium.com/@nuno.caneco/cmder-quake-style-e57601d1c0...

[3] https://conemu.github.io/

Per_Bothner
You could try out DomTerm (https://domterm.org). It has many unique features (http://domterm.org/Features.html), and it runs fine on WSL.

DomTerm doesn't have Quake-like drop-down, but I'm open to adding it. If someone can tell me how to bind a key (at the global/system level) to a command like 'domterm --toggle-hide', it should be easy to have that command call the Electron show/hide methods of a BrowserWindow, which I'm hoping would do the job.

kyting
You can take a look at https://www.puttygen.com/windows-terminal-emulators, which is a good assessment on most popular terminal emulators for Windows.

Personally I am using console2, which is quite good and fits my needs (support multiple tabbed consoles, named title etc). You also can try Cygwin's terminal, and run it inside console2.