Tomaz Canabrava Ramblings

Konsole is having a resurge in the moment, it’s the terminal emulator of choice for the power user that wants to break the 4th wall in *nix systems. Right now it can do almost all the things I want it to do, and a few more.

Since last year you can use splits in Konsole, with full drag & drop support between tabs and windows.

You can also use Konsole to quickly check for thumbnails of anything that dolphin can show you, just by hovering with the mouse (and depending of your configuration) pressing shift/control/alt. To my knowledge Konsole is the only terminal emulator that supports this.

Some terminals like Tilix and Terminator offers the possibility to split the screen recursively, and I started to add the same thing to konsole. Konsole is usually said to be the swiss army knife of the terminal emulators, and if you didn’t try it yet, please do. We offer quite a lot of things that no other terminal emulator offer.

Wayland needs a different mindset when you are programming, you cannot just assume things works the same way as in as X11. One of my first patches to konsole was the rewrite of the Tab Bar, and a different way to deal with Drag & Drop of the tabs. In my mind - and how wrong I was - I could assume that I was dragging to a konsole main window by querying the widget below the mouse.

We are seeing a strange trend nowadays: The terminal is being more widely used in windows, after they fixed the broken cmd.exe and MS is actually actively promoting their terminal applications like Visual Studio Code and the new Windows Terminal, but on the other hand the Unix world was always terminal based, even if you tend to use the Desktop Environment for your daily needs you probably also had a Terminal open somewhere.