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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.

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It's very cool if you are constantly using i.e. mc (midnight commander) and you want to work with all existing shortcuts :D. Because some short keys don't work on xterm with menu gnome support and it is an advantage in mc :D. Good example of this could be shourtcut F10 or another. If you try to use it in standard gnome-terminal in mc it doesn't work, but on xterm works very well. – user75638 Jul 7 '12 at 18:02

5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

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).

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Unicode is a big deal. – Justinas Dūdėnas May 24 '12 at 6:06
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As far as I can see in both Xterm and UXterm, Unicode characters such as those in cat ~/Desktop/examples.desktop look absolutely identical, with or without TrueType fonts selected via Control+right click. How exactly are these two terminal emulators different? – Dan Dascalescu Dec 30 '12 at 10:35
up vote 0 down vote

I personally prefer urxvt as my terminal emulator; I recently switched from uxterm due to urxvt's low memory usage. Gnome-terminal is generally even 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 you have a program outputting a significant amount of data to the terminal emulator, fast scrolling can result in a huge 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's profile's can be useful at times. With one click, you can change from white-on-black to black-on-white or a small programming font to a larger font for writing. Though, if you don't use your terminal emulator often, profiles will probably be of little use to you and if you do use it often, changing your .Xresources file to configure xterm isn't really too much of a hassle.

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up vote -1 down vote

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.

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How exactly are xterm and uxterm useless? I'm much rather press F10 in xterm than Esc, 0 in gnome-terminal, and with true-type fonts xterm looks awesome. – Dan Dascalescu Dec 30 '12 at 10:29
up vote 3 down vote

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

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

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up vote 6 down vote

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?).

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You`re kidding, they can`t add multiple versions of software because of different fonts. Bugging people, because it makes sense to 1% of users and costs so little disk space? There must be serious differences. – Justinas Dūdėnas Jan 14 '12 at 18:20
@JustinasDūdėnas: I don't say they are identical from the functional point of view, and I don't say they only differ in fonts (that is somewhat configurable, by the way), but two software don't need to have "serious differences" to be both included in the repositories. The choice is left to user's preferences. – enzotib Jan 14 '12 at 18:27
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xterm doesn't depend on other software, which may be of use in the event you accidentally uninstall something. – daithib8 May 23 '12 at 20:13
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You can use truetype fonts (and anti-aliasing) for xterm with control-right click (hold), select "truetype fonts" – Janus Troelsen Jul 31 '12 at 14:02
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My point is, that including almost identical software forces users to make choise which they don`t need. You can compare it to overdocumenting, or adding a second poweroff button. – Justinas Dūdėnas Sep 23 '12 at 7:44

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