I try like he** to leave gnome-terminal for 8 years now but nothing has lured me away. It. Just. Ain’t. Broke. It does nothing wrong. I use Alacritty, too.
I use Konsole.
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I’m another one who uses Konsole. It does everything I need very nicely.
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I have an opinion (which is all it is), that most modern terminal apps offer almost all the same things (aka feature parity). Oh, I’ll grant there are one or two unique things about each, but for most people it’s irrelevant. There don’t seem to be strong things (other than individual preference) to promote one over another.
My own preference for Konsole is simply because it shares libraries with my DE (Plasma). If I were running another DE, i’d probably use it’s own native graphical terminal.
I also laugh at myself, because with todays mega memory (compared to years past), having a lot of different shared libraries loaded, probably doesn’t make much difference, but old habits die hard.
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I never really had a preference. I use alacritty because I use openbox. I also have xfce-terminal as a backup terminal incase a update or setting leaves my alacritty unusable. Other than that I always just used what came with the DE I was using. I never really had a preference as they were all capable of doing the task in which I needed to use them for.
I get the appeal of something like kitty that can show graphic images natively however I find most of that is just a visual appeal that really doesn’t add anything else to the actual functionality to the terminal. At the end of the day what matters most is its ability to do the job I just assigned it to do.
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Now I’m very comfortable using Ptyxis for its built-in containers feature, but in the past I’ve used Alacritty, kitty, foot, Wezterm, sakura, and BlackBox as well. I’m not a heavy terminal user so my experiences probably don’t matter, but I remember finding foot and Wezterm hard to deal with. Alacritty and kitty I was okay with and used for a while. Then I jumped ship to sakura, BlackBox, and Ptyxis. I actually find them most comfortable to use! Aesthetically speaking I actually prefer BlackBox over Ptyxis, but I’ve been working with containers more and Ptyxis’ convenient container selector helps out a lot. sakura is very lovely for its simplicity, love it.
Love Ptyxis:
BlackBox. I find it classy-looking.
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I agree, my only requirement is that it should work both on linux and windows. Hence my choice of wezterm. I just need one config file for all my machines.
I tried alacrity for a while and I really liked it. Only difference between alacritty and wezterm is tabs. I need tabs which most terminal emulators have, including konsole and except alacritty.
I have used konsole for more than a year and I love it. If I’m on KDE I used a drop-down emulator based on konsole known as Yakuake.
These look good, can’t wait to try them
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I actually think that terminals are quite variable.
I think that an individuals needs/preferences are the biggest difference.
It depends what you expect a terminal to do. If you only need a place to type commands and see the output then they probably all seem the same. If you have different expectations than that, suddenly they start to look different.
I am often surprised by how often terminals lack key features I would consider basic requirements.
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Can you list some of those features?
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There are probably more but off the top of my head:
- Transparency
- Flexible splitting
- Large scrollback support
- Ability to have a very minimal UI
- Support for colors
- Option for the terminal to close when the process ends
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On Sway I have been using Foot for several years and really like it.
It is very lightweight, in every sense: very few dependencies, very little disk space needed, and very modest memory usage.
For those who wish to take the light resource usage even further, Foot can be run in client-server mode. This allows multiple terminal windows to share the same base process, further cutting down on memory and CPU usage. https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot#server-daemon-mode
It is also blazing fast. For certain renders where the window content “moves” but does not need to be explicitly redrawn, Foot can be faster than even the GPU-accelerated terminals! See the author’s explanation here: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/wiki/Performance
On i3, my favorite terminal is plain old xterm. It’s nothing much out of the box, you kind of have to figure out what features you want to add and then build up your X resources config. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xterm. Even though xterm seems like some old relic from the past with hardly any features at first glance, it really is quite configurable and has some unique features.
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Xtern IS a relic from the past (mostly). But yeah, it was my first too.
I’m another Konsole user. It fits the bill.
The only other emulator of note that caught my attention for a while was cool-retro-term, which a few others mentioned some years back 
It’s satisfyingly retro, but purely for the looks:
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THAT is cool!
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I’ve never tried using cool-retro-term as my main terminal emulator, but it’s been installed on pretty much every distro I’ve used. Particularly fond of the “Futuristic” preset.
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I have to say, I don’t miss monochrome low res displays 
I lived through them…it was awful lol
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Love this emulator and the themes it comes with
Great list, thanks kindly!
One more minor but handy one is dynamic config. I.e. changes to config take place immediately upon config file save (no need for reload or restart).