I'm considering trying out a more 'modern' terminal emulator. While it's not a deal breaker, it would be a little bit fun with support for emojis.

I can't seem to find a terminal emulator that supports both coloured and underlined links. It should also allow me to open links with keyboard shortcuts.

Any recommendations?

@hund Personally I use alacritty. I also used to use urxvt before for many years but then switched away because of limitations regarding fonts and colors.

Alacritty provides hints with underlining and possibly colors for links upon keypress (I don't know if it's possible to show them always) and also shows single keys to open the links (like some browsers or extensions).

@okraits I looked into Alacritty, and they dismissed a user quite rudely, saying that the link colour was an anti-feature.

@hund

It reloads its config automatically so it's easy to make changes and for example possible to change the font or colorscheme. I have a little script using fzf which updates symbolic links to included files for the font and the colorscheme. I like to use a light or dark colorscheme depending on the light level around me.

@hund

Alternatives are for example kitty and wezterm. They provide additional features like tabs or tiling which I don't need (I'm using tmux for that).

Another powerful terminal emulator named ghostty is in development but currently in closed beta (will be opensource later).

@okraits Kitty and wezterm looks promising. :)

@okraits Well..

WezTerm

$ ./WezTerm-20240203-110809-5046fc22-Ubuntu20.04.AppImage
/tmp/.mount_WezTer87w2rF/usr/bin/wezterm-gui: error while loading shared libraries: libwayland-client.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Kitty

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
Dependency resolution took 1.68 s (backtrack: 1/20).

[ebuild  N     ] x11-terms/kitty-shell-integration-0.32.2::gentoo  7,914 KiB
[ebuild  N     ] dev-lang/go-bootstrap-1.20.14::gentoo  USE="(-big-endian)" 93,230 KiB
[ebuild  N     ] x11-terms/kitty-terminfo-0.32.2::gentoo  0 KiB
[ebuild  N     ] dev-lang/go-1.22.1:0/1.22.1::gentoo  CPU_FLAGS_X86="sse2" 26,903 KiB
[ebuild  N     ] x11-terms/kitty-0.32.2::gentoo  USE="X -test -verify-sig -wayland" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_11 -python3_10 -python3_12" 1,374 KiB

Total: 5 packages (5 new), Size of downloads: 129,419 KiB

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No] 

Go? No thanks! :D

@albi Foot is Wayland only, and Yakuake is some drop-down KDE thingy.

@hund
+1 to alacritty. You can configure it to select and open links with the regex hints feature: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Regex_hints

@jiminycricket Can you put colour and underline styling on links?

@hund @jiminycricket Do you really need colored links? I don't think urxvt provides this ;-)

@okraits @jiminycricket No?

https://hunden.linuxkompis.se/img/my-desktop-2023-01-12--02.png

;)

@hund @jiminycricket Ok, and the colored links come from urxvt, not from the applications?

I looked in the alacritty docs, you can configure foreground and background colors for the hints (the keys assigned to each link) but not for the link itself. I'm okay with that, with colored hints the links stand out anyway 😀

@okraits @jiminycricket Yes. :) That's not good enough for me though!

@hund BTW, if you're into terminal emulators, the ghostty devlog might be interesting:

https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

@okraits Into? How are you supposed to be able to use a computer if you don't have a terminal emulator? :P

@hund 😀

"Into" as in "especially interested in" 😀

@okraits Aren't all especially interested in them? :P

@hund Somehow, with much fantasy, I could imagine that some people just like to use them and do not care more for them. Strange people :P

@okraits Noo. That sounds like some sort of saga that grandparents tell their grandchildren to spook them.

@hund

Also interesting: https://beuke.org/terminal-latency/

And it mentions the zutty terminal which I didn't knew about.

@okraits Cool! That was a good read. :)