A terminal emulator is a program that lets you use a terminal in a graphical environment. Because most people use an operating system with a graphical user interface (GUI) for their day-to-day computer needs, most Linux users require a terminal emulator.
Fortunately, the open-source community offers us a wide selection of these, including the rapidly gaining popularity of GPU-Accelerated terminal emulators.
But now we’ll look at one other terminal emulator, Xfce Terminal, which after 15 months of development, has delighted its fans with its first 1.0 stable release.
Xfce Terminal 1.0 Highlights
Xfce Terminal is a lightweight and user-friendly terminal emulator application that includes many advanced features such as drop-down, tabs, unlimited scrolling, full colors, fonts, transparent backgrounds, etc.
Xfce Terminal, like GNOME Terminal, is built on the Vte terminal widget library. However, Vte is not the fastest terminal emulation library out there, but it is one of the best in terms of Unicode support and is actively developed.
The app was in the capable hands of Igor Zakharov from 2016 to 2020. Then, it went dormant for a few months in 2021 before Anestis Kefalidis took over development in September 2021. As a result, this is the first stable release of Xfce Terminal, with him as the maintainer.
The new version places a strong emphasis on the terminal’s scrolling capabilities. As a result, the “Scrolling on output” preference has been improved and will now be temporarily disabled if you scroll up. On top of that, the overlay scrollbars are now supported.
Users for whom the appearance of the terminal is essential are also not forgotten. For example, the fans of background images can use the new “Filled” option as a new style option.
As the developer points out, most of his time was spent rewriting the code that handles accelerators in Xfce Terminal 1.0 and creating various menus.
This removed most of the deprecated code in Xfce Terminal and fixed various minor issues or inconsistencies in the old code while shrinking the codebase.
Among other noteworthy changes, Xfce Terminal 1.0 comes with revamped “Unsafe Paste” dialog and now also gives you an option to disable it temporarily. Moreover, you can now directly send signals to the foreground process through the UI.
You can refer to the official announcement for detailed information about all changes.
