Linux

The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you're a serious terminal user.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such

I think that's a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don't understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.

Im using what DE provides by default. If You do not know what You need from terminal that means You probably do not need anything more. Make a switch when You want something particular. On the other note I think You might be more interested in different shell rather than terminal. So fir example zsh or fish (You are most likely currently using bash)

Konsole, because it fits in nicely with Plasma (as you would expect) and does everything I need a terminal to do.

I am perfectly happy with Konsole, and sleep well despite perhaps missing out on features I don't know about.

Are you serious? It's just a window where text is printed. Use what your DE provides. Now I'm mostly on LXQt, so I use QTerminal. With tiling WMs I prefer urxvt because I don't need builtin window splitting ans tabs. I can't imagine what other features may I need.

I use xfce4-terminal, lxterminal is also good for the same reasons. The nice thing about them is that their configs are very stable (this can be a bit of an issue with KDE, e.g. I recently had to redo my editor themes for Kate because the old ones weren't compatible anymore), and they save system resources by letting all terminals run in one process. Running terminal windows in separate processes might protect you from crashes, but even though I use terminals heavily I just never have terminal crashes. And they're simpler to configure than e.g. urxvt.

Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.

Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I'd install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I'll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.

kitty. The ssh kitten is enough reason to use it. I work ob a lot of different systems that require OTP. Using the ssh kitten I can type the OTP once and can spawn new terminals that ssh and cd to the remote direvtory without logging in again. Obviosly the tabs and window panes are are a must too. There's tons of other useful features that I like, like using hints to select nunbers, filenames, urls, etc in the terminal output.

Alacritty, one of the first rust based terminals. Fast, simple config. Had no problems. Foot as a second if you want an alternative.

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.

OP, to be frank, descriptions like "general terminal stuff" and "nothing terribly fancy" are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you're (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.

what do you folks use

Ptyxis

and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.

i just use xterm. it has proper unicode support now and is very lightweight. or maybe urxvt if i need more features.

on termux where xterm doesn't run i use st instead, it needs some source patching (very barebones) but it works pretty well.

Ghostty 👻

If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn't have all that fancy stuff that I don't need (and that takes up cpu cycles).

I'm using st with tmux. It's in written in c, simple configuration can be done by editing the header file(s). More complex customization (such as visual bell or transparency) can be done via patch files.

Not the most beginner friendly terminal but super light weight and fast.

I was tinkering with ollama+deepseek and trying to integrate it into my bash functions, but gave up, because i could not supress that stupid "thinking..." prompt. Found it easyer to just have a browser window open (switching windows can become muscle memory in tiling wms like i3/sway or dwm).

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.

I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don't need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn't have this really handy theme switching feature.

That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn't as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.

I like guake, or yakuake.. they are inspired by the console in Quake. F9 drops it down and hides it. Works for what i need it to. I'm just a guy who recently ditched windows, not a power user.

Surprised that there's so few drop-down terminals being mentioned; I use Tilda but I guess they are all fine as long as they work on one's distro config. It's so handy to always have the console locked and loaded invisibly, but toggled by the press of a button.

I have determined that foot is best for me personally, like alacritty and a couple others, it is very barebones. No tabs or anything like that without tmux. But it doesn't rely on GPU acceleration and is just as fast (or faster) than my experience using GPU accelerated terminals. Easy to configure and since it doesn't have the GPU requirements it works on old hardware like a dream. Only possible issue is that it is wayland only but since that is all I like to use it is perfect.

I find a lot like ghostty and wezterm try to include too many features. All I need a terminal emulator to be is a terminal emulator. But then a lot of these then add tabs, build in multiplexers & more and it is more bloated than I like a simple utility to be. Additionally, I don't need native tabs as a lot I do in the terminal uses SSH so it is easier just to use tmux/zilji and not have to manage it as much.

My terminal of choice nowadays is Alacritty. It's nice and clean, has a text based config file and decent feature support. The only annoyance is the lack of tabs, but I spend most of my terminal time ssh'd into a tmux session on a remote server anyway.

I like minimal terminals, was using st for a long time and now I'm using foot for quite a while already. Since I'm using tmux I don't need my terminal to have any tab/windowing features

My suggestion is you focus more on learning to use the terminal than figuring out which one to use. Switching terminals is like a micro version of distro hopping without the benefits.

I use ollama for llms, but being a terminal tool, you need to be comfortable using the terminal.

To answer your original question, I use alacritty. Minimal bells and whistles. Just a terminal.

I love foot. The only caveat is that it's only for Wayland (no X support).

I recently tried out some terminals but in the end it didn't really make all that big of a difference, maybe because I use tmux so I don't need split functionality. For a long time I used Gnome Console because it came with my distro but then I tried Ghostty because some people said it was the best and I also thought I was missing out. However for me it was mostly the same as before and it was cool in a way but for some reason it didn't really click. Now I am using Wezterm because other people said it's the best and what i like is that it comes as a flatpak and it is configured using Lua. But I could just go back to Gnome Console if I had to.

I like Tilix

Wezterm has been my daily for years. Has enough extras to let any crazy terminal app work as intended but doesn't try to do too much.

I'm using Kitty. Kitten ssh is smooth as I ssh into other machines a lot. I also love being able to split the screen and have tabs. I use Kitty session a lot, I have a pre-configured yaml file that just sets up the terminal for me. I like the keyboard shortcuts too.

I used urxvt on my last install, but now I'm using Kitty because urxvt on Debian isn't compiled with true colour and I didn't want to install from source.

xfce4-terminal, in wayland+niri too. Because alternatives are always missing some features or are too bloated.

I like Sakura. It's lightweight.

Linux vtty forever! Can't cat data into the framebuffer when your desktop is getting in the way!!

Jk I use gnome terminal for everything, or whatever default is available. It's quite amazing that most of them handle all but the most niche terminal features these days.

When I need to install a terminal emulator for some reason I always go for urxvt.. but it is pretty terrible (it's a great vt but mouse interaction is clunky and graphics are old school) compared to pretty much everything else.