Enough with the text editors... let's talk Terminal Emulators!

[Edvard]

Call them Virtual Terminals, Terminal Emulators or Command Windows, anybody who has ever done anything involving configuration or administration that only requires a line or two of shell, knows what I'm talking about.  I get by just fine with Xfce4-terminal, others may stick with good ol' Xterm or Rxvt , or go in for fancy stuff like Guake, but I've run into no less than 2 VT's lately:

This one seems to go out of it's way to invoke nostalgia while your wrestling with file permission in /usr/share, but hey... I typed 'CLS' more than once, so mission accomplished.

Cool-Old-Term

Cool-old-term is a terminal emulator which tries to mimic the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens. It has been designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight.

https://github.com/Swordifish90/cool-old-term

This next one aims to be the Swiss Army Knife of terminal emulators.  A modern UI bolted on to a solid terminal.  I like it (even if I can't compile it... yet).

FinalTerm

Final Term is a new breed of terminal emulator.
It goes beyond mere emulation and understands what is happening inside the shell it is hosting. This allows it to offer features no other terminal can, including:
   Semantic text menus
   Smart command completion
   GUI terminal controls

http://finalterm.org/

[Cuffy]

I've got two or three of those old terminals. Had more but gave them to the recyclers while I could still lift them!
Also have an old 8086 IBM computer, LOADED, with a couple of five and a quarter floppies. I keep that available in case this machine with Win8.1.1 should die unexpectedly. 
Have fun!

[ewemoa]

Hadn't heard of either and specifically curious about the further development of Final Term to see how some of the planned features evolve.  Thanks for mentioning them


Currently using sakura / lilyterm / emacs for the most part, but they all seem to have their drawbacks...

[40hz]

For simple tasks I use Guake. Can't beat the convenience of that drop-down feature.

For more complex multi-terminal needs I'll use Terminator.

I've generally found it's best to just pick a TE found in your repository and stick with it until you learn it inside out. If it gives you everything you want, stop there. If not, try another one. They're all pretty much the same under the hood.

[Edvard]

They're all pretty much the same under the hood.

Agreed.  Though I never could get used to Guake... 

Finalterm looks to me like the devs are making a concerted effort to get the terminal interface a little further out of its past, which I think is laudable.  We've done it with text editors, why not?

[Ath]

This isn't limited to *nix TE's I presume?

[40hz]

This isn't limited to *nix TE's I presume?

Doesn't have to be. Share what you've got. We're all friends here.

[Tuxman]

OpenBSD/FreeBSD desktops:
I prefer urxvt on *ix systems. Terminator is weird IMO. (But I'll surely try Final Term soon!) "Multi-terminal needs" can easily be solved with tmux.   In the very rare cases I want to use more than one terminal X window, I just press a hotkey and a second one opens. Thank you, awesome wm!

OSX:
This is a hard case. I have to work with OSX in the office. Terminal.app makes me sick. I installed iTerm2 as it has a nicer handling but it sometimes freezes when my ssh is connected too long. Rather annoying. I plan to replace iTerm2 by the Emacs shell next week (M-x shell) as I use Emacs with TRAMP for most "real" working tasks anyway.



Windows:
Easy. ConEmu with a PyCmd interpreter. Beat that.

[Edvard]

Windows:
Easy. ConEmu with a PyCmd interpreter. Beat that.

I'm liking that split command/file window.
Very nice! 

[40hz]

"Multi-terminal needs" can easily be solved with tmux.

"Easily solved" just so long as everyone's needs are the same.  

I'm familiar with tmux btw. It's a very sweet bit of code if you don't mind one more client/server running on your system. But tmux's design goals are somewhat different than Terminator's.

Nice we have so many choices.

[panzer]

Final Term looks nice:
http://finalterm.org/