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I'm an average home user, but still sometimes use terminal for simple tasks. When I type "terminal" in unity, it offers me three choices - but what`s the difference? I hate always choosing randomly and thinking about what I did.

enzotib
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Justinas Dūdėnas
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5 Answers5

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Terminal is, in Ubuntu default software, the gnome-terminal. XTerm is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xterm. UXTerm is XTerm with support to Unicode characters. The main difference between XTerm and Terminal is that the gnome-terminal has more features, while XTerm is minimalistic (though it has features that are't in gnome-terminal, but they are more advanced).

Yure16
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If you are using Ubuntu, you should also have gnome-terminal installed. For Kubuntu the default terminal is konsole, and for Lubuntu is lxterminal.

All three are good choices.

To be Desktop Environment independent as much as possible, I would choose lxterminal.

xterm, and uxterm are good but they use ugly looking fonts, and pose some problems in regards to keystrokes (see How do I set up hotkeys for a xterm?).

Community
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enzotib
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8

The default is "terminal", which is gnome-terminal.

You can also summon one with a hotkey ctrl-alt-T

Adrian
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Gnome-terminal is generally more of a resource hog than xterm and rxvt. Also, gnome-terminal's install size is generally around ten times larger than xterm's.

By default, urxvt uses a feature called fast scrolling. This causes the terminal emulator to not always update the window when the content changes. If a program is outputting a significant amount of data to the terminal emulator, fast scrolling can result in a noticeable performance boost. Xterm has this option disabled by default, but you can enable it by putting XTerm*fastScroll: True in your .Xresources file. Gnome-terminal does not seem to have this feature.

Gnome-terminal has profiles that allow you to define and quickly switch between configurations.

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For an average user, xterm and uxterm are pretty useless.

I personally rely on gnome-terminal even for advanced usage. I simply remove the other two, so I don't be bothered with them showing in my apps search.

Adame Dahmani
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