Why Two Terminals?

[jwoltman]

Can anyone tell me why the Gnome project has two different terminals - gnome-terminal and kgx? Is there some official post or bug report listing the benefits of maintaining two extremely similar things? Will one of them be removed in a future version?

[mcatanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

Hi, gnome-terminal is the old “official” terminal and gnome-console (kgx) is the new one. gnome-terminal has not been included in GNOME releases for a while now, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever going away. Maintainers are still working on it and releasing new versions. There’s a lot of GNOME software that’s no longer part of the core desktop but is still developed and released because people find it useful. So you can use whichever you prefer.

There is also a third option, Ptyxis, which is based on the design of gnome-console but adds a lot of additional features.

[jwoltman]

Oh, I guess it’s a Fedora thing because Fedora 40 has gnome-terminal as the default app that shows up in the app launcher. It’s a bit confusing.

[mcatanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

Fedora never switched to Console.

Now it’s switching to Ptyxis.

[jwoltman]

Do you think Ptyxis going to be included in Gnome releases?

[yvs2014]

gnome-terminal and kgx(gnome-console)… two extremely similar things

I’d not say so, there’s two main things that I want from terminal - tabs and transparency. Almost in all cases gnome-terminal is provided with transparency patch, gnome-console - not. Ptyxis is also okay (not so comfy to set opacity via gsettings, but at least it’s possible).

[mcatanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

@jwoltman

Do you think Ptyxis going to be included in Gnome releases?

Not in the near term.

Maybe in the future? I don’t know what the future holds.

[jwoltman]

@yvs2014

I’d not say so, there’s two main things that I want from terminal - tabs and transparency. Almost in all cases gnome-terminal is provided with transparency patch, gnome-console - not. Ptyxis is also okay (not so comfy to set opacity via gsettings, but at least it’s possible).

I hear you, g-t definitely has more features. It’s kind of funny because when you look at them side-by-side it’s hard to tell to which is going to be more customizable. They’re a bit like Mario and Luigi.

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

GNOME Terminal is using GTK3; Console (and Ptyxis) use GTK4 and libadwaita—which is also the reason why they were written.

Console is a minimalistic terminal, meant to be used as a last resort when the GUI fails you; Ptyxis is a developers tool, as it integrates with containerisation technologies like podman and toolbox. The scope and tradeoffs of each project are different.