What terminal would you reccomend. And how to set it as default?

answered Aug 28 '13

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updated Aug 28 '13

As far as a lightweight terminal emulator which fits the i3-philosophy, I think that is going to be a matter of opinion. A lot of people use urxvt (also known as rxvt-unicode), I don't use a lightweight terminal emulator, but I use gnome-terminal. If you want really lightweight, but not very configurable, you could use st, which is part of the suckless-tools package (dmenu is part of the package as well) which is installed as one of the dependencies of i3.

By default, the terminal launched by $mod+Return, is whatever is defined by the i3-sensible-terminal command. If you look at the man page for i3-sensible-terminal, you will see that it launches whichever program is defined by $TERMINAL, if that is not defined, it falls back on x-terminal-emulator, then goes down a list if that is not defined. If you do not wish to define $TERMINAL in your shell config, and you are on a debian-based system (Debian, Ubuntu, Linux-Mint, etc), you can define which program is launched by x-terminal-emulator by running the command: update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator