Raspberry Pi 4: Chronicling the Desktop Experience – Terminal Emulators – Week 35

Last Updated on December 29, 2021

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.

For this week’s blog, I decided to survey terminal emulators. A terminal emulator is computer software which emulates a dumb video terminal within some other display architecture.

My favourite terminal emulator is Hyper. Even though it’s built with web technologies (read Electron and TypeScript), it’s really fast. But that’s only my personal preference.

If you spend any time at the command line, a good terminal emulator helps make it a better experience. I traversed through all of the 22 programs highlighted in this Group Test and investigated the position from an RPI4 perspective.

I’ve summarized my findings in the table below.

As the table shows, the vast majority of the programs have a package in the Raspberry Pi OS’s repositories. Disappointingly, there are no packages for 3 of the highest rated terminal emulators (Alacritty, Terminus, and Hyper). Despite a package present for Kitty, it doesn’t run on the RPI4. Kitty requires working OpenGL 3.3 drivers, which the RPI4 doesn’t have. And trying to fool Kitty that it does (MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3) was never going to work.

For all the terminal emulators without a package, I tried to compile the source. I’m definitely not an expert at compiling software. And I acknowledge that a few of the programs probably won’t ever work on the RPI4.

Despite a fair amount of effort, I wasn’t successful in compiling Alacritty, Terminus, Hyper, Extraterm, or DomTerm. I got close with a few of them, but it was a frustrating experience. If you’ve managed to compile any of these programs, I’d be delighted to learn how. There’s a comments facility at the bottom of this article.

I compiled st and termite, the former was a trivial exercise. Compiling termite was a little more involved (the steps taken are listed at the end of this article). I didn’t have time to try compiling programs which are supported in the repositories even though many of the packages are old versions.

Here’s a chart showing the memory footprint of the terminal emulators. All of the terminal emulators have tiny memory footprints. There’ll be no problem having multiple terminals running whatever the model of the RPI4.

Compiling Termite

First, we need to install yarn, the gperf package, clone libvte’s GitHub repository, and compile the source code, with the commands:

$ npm install -g yarn
$ sudo apt install gperf
$ git clone https://github.com/thestinger/vte-ng
$ cd vte-ng && ./autogen.sh
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install

Then we can clone Termite’s GitHub repository, and compile the source code, with the commands:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/thestinger/termite.git
$ cd termite && make -j4

Summary

I had a poor success rate in compiling terminal emulators for the RPI4. If you’ve managed to compile any of the programs I couldn’t get working, please share your findings in the Comments box below.

If I have to choose one terminal emulator, my preference is Hyper. Alas, despite my best endeavours, I wasn’t able to compile it for the RPI4.

Read all my blog posts about the RPI4.

This blog is written on the RPI4.