layout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures...

There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell.

Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simple things like rendering and more important things like hotkeys. It's nice to have an alternative that I can install on any system such that I can get comfortable with just the one. If I can't install anything I'm often stuck poking around to find whatever the devs version of correct is, or else asking the owner of the machine "okay, how the hell do I do {x}?" if they're comfy with their cli, but chances are if I'm sitting there it's because they're not comfy with their cli.

I could cover a lot of it with a bashrc file, but I wouldn't want anyone fucking with mine, so I'm not touching anyone elses.

edit: distrObutions->distrIbutions

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tom_alexander a day ago | parent [-]

> tab-complete, history

Those would be handled by your shell, not your terminal, right?

> multiplexing

If you have a good window manager, then there is no reason to have a bespoke multiplexing implementation in your terminal. I can stack my terminals and _any other window I want_ with tabs and switch between them using the same hotkeys/interface that I use for my whole system, rather than each app implementing their own tabs.

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cbarnes99 a day ago | parent [-]

Some people frequently or exclusively work on remote systems over ssh. Multiple windows is not an alternative to a multiplexer. They have some overlap in use cases. But it's not 1-1.

	▲	tom_alexander a day ago \| parent [-]
		In that situation, the multiplexing wouldn't be handled in the terminal. You'd use something like tmux or screen. Seems irrelevant to the discussion about terminals.