bluebottle

Using Konsole / Gnome Terminal on Windows

I've always wanted to use Konsole on Windows. It's mostly because I'm sick of using PuTTY as an SSH terminal. it's fine for what it does, but the fact it doesn't run from a shell that has a full set of Linux userspace tools has always been an irritant. A few months ago I decided to start looking for a better solution -- running Konsole on my Windows box.

A few years ago this would have been mostly impossible but I now use Konsole on all my machines! There are a few solutions for using a better terminal emulator on Windows. In order of usability:

• Use Konsole in a VMWare Workstation VM and enable Unity - Unity is like Parallels for Mac, except it's on Windows. You boot up your Windows / Linux VM and enable it, and the windows in the VM become native windows on the host. The emulation isn't perfect, but alt-tab and copy/paste work which are the important two. Drag & Drop between the two OSes works well in VMware too. The biggest problem is that it's relatively slow compared to other solutions and dragging windows around makes it obvious there is trickery going on.
• Use Konsole in VirtualBox and enable Seamless Mode - Like VMWare Workstation, but it doesn't work as well and costs less (ie, free). Copy/paste is a little flaky (don't try to do anything but plain text), alt-tab isn't unified. On the plus side, the emulation feels a lot snappier than VMWare.
• Use Konsole in andLinux - Definitely the fastest solution, alt-tab works properly and copy/paste is pretty good too. The only issue is that andLinux communicates between the host & client OS via a special loopback NIC it installs, and this played havoc with my Windows Vista laptop. With the device enabled Windows would ignore other NICs installed (like a ethernet or wifi connection) and refuse to talk to the internet. Dis/Enabling the andLinux NIC and rebooting the guest would get it working eventually, but it was a lot of work. I suspect with more work a simple solution could be found, but I gave up.
• Use Konsole in KDE for Windows - fgsfds, try this only if you have a lot of patience and willingness to hack stuff. I couldn't get everything installed sucessfully, much less working. Once it's setup properly I'm sure it will win, though.

Comments (2)