 When I switched to XFCE a couple weeks ago, one of the first things that I did was go on the hunt for a new terminal emulator And while I've been using Alacrity for a couple years now What I wanted to do in XFCE was have one that was both a good terminal emulator But also had a good drop-down mode now. I know that XFCE term has a drop-down mode built in But I couldn't get nerd fonts to work in it. I don't know what was going on there They just would not show up in the font selector Even though they were Perfectly fine in all the other applications. So I couldn't get everything to work there So I was looking for a different terminal emulator and I landed on Tilex. Thanks to somebody's suggestion and Tilex is a really Fascinating terminal emulator And I've honestly found that I like it better than Basically any other terminal emulator that I've used in the last two years including Alacrity Which is kind of surprising now the first thing that I'll say right off the bat Is that Tilex is not going to be for everyone and if you like or prefer minimalism Or if you like to configure your terminal in a configuration file Tilex is probably not for you It's definitely not the lightest terminal you're ever going to find So if that's where you look for your terminal emulators You probably can stop watching now because Tilex is not a light terminal emulator. It has a ton Of features and a ton of options and most of those are GUI based So just to keep that in mind as we go on. So first, let's actually take a look at Tilex So this is what my Tilex looks like and as you can tell it's not Alacrity It has things here that Alacrity is never going to have even in a windowed environment So it has some buttons up here. It has the tab bar here And if you right click it has you know a menu, right? That's not something that Alacrity has And while you can configure kitty to have that kind of stuff Alacrity does not and that's where I'm coming from is Alacrity now There are a couple things that make Tilex really really cool. So if I make this bigger And I press this button here. I get a split So if you are a tmux user, you know how Awesome splits are and you can split both horizontally and vertically And that means you can have multiple terminals open tiled in one window Now obviously this doesn't have all of the features that tmux has so Don't get into my comments and tell me hey matt. This isn't nothing like tmux. I understand I'm not saying that this is tmux. This is just one feature that tmux gives you and Tilex has it built in so That's just what i'm saying there So that's one really cool feature that I've been using quite often Is the tiling functionality because I've been missing tiling in terms of like my window manager like xfc Doesn't have really good built-in tiling. So I've been missing that by having tiling in my terminal. This is fantastic So tilex isn't the only terminal out there that has built-in tiling But I like the way they implement it. There are key bindings that you can use to Tile if you want to use the key bindings and not the buttons up here But I've just been using the buttons. It seems to work fairly well for me So that's one feature another one that I really like is that despite my interest in configuring my Terminal in a configuration file in previous, you know iterations of my existence I Have found that I've really liked configuring Tilex in a GUI So if I go up here to the three button menu and go to preferences One of the things that is really nice about tilex is that it comes with a lot of settings a lot of customization settings and It also has drop-down modes so That was one of the things that I really needed to have happen was that I had to have drop-down mode included in it simply because this is what I've been using for a scratch pad and Without scratch pads. I'm basically lost. I don't really like using my computer without them I miss them desperately when I can't use them So I needed something that would give me at least something like that functionality. So so with the drop-down mode included inside of tilex I found myself not missing scratch pads nearly as much even though it's not quite the same functionality So if I go back to the settings here, we can go through some of the settings It has obviously separate profile. So if you want to switch between profiles, you can do that It allows you to customize the appearance in just any way you basically would want to You can choose to disable some of the the toolbars and go completely borderless if you want So if we close that and we do this it'll actually I think we're gonna actually have to close all tilex in order to see that Yeah, that worked. So there's now no actual like top bar here Even though it does still have a close and maximize button So I'll put that back to normal so that I can actually make it look the right like the rest of my windows But there are a ton of other things that you can do in terms of appearance You can change the title style the tab position The theme variant which would change between light and dark the background image if you wanted one The a session name if you wanted to change the window title You can also do that based on a terminal command if you wanted to Script a like a key binding or something like that in order to open up a certain Terminal program you could do that you can change how the handle looks for splits and so on and so forth Now like I said does have quake mode, which is this mode right here If we can move this out of the way, it's basically just a drop-down terminal. They call it quake Still not sure why that that type of terminal is called that it's a game I'm not sure what the maybe that I've never played that game Which is probably not a good admission to make being a nerd But the point is is that they call it that and there's a few Settings here that you can change for to determine how it looks and acts and stuff like that So you can change the height and width you can change the alignment whether or not it's always on top And whether or not it will show on all workspaces and things like that So if I actually were to change workspace to to workspace for it would actually stay up Like with other terminals, you can also create bookmarks and shortcuts It also will allow you to change the encoding for the terminal I'm not sure why the encoding gets its own like tab along the side That doesn't really make any sense to me It seems like that would work just as well in an encoding in a drop down in the global settings But whatever and there is one thing here for the advanced mode, which allows you to Create a user defined links that can be clicked on in the terminal based on regular expression definitions So red red X I'm not sure what that'd be useful for but you can do it and like I said You can change a whole bunch of stuff when it comes to the profiles This is where you change the different titles If you wanted to create profiles with different titles for the terminal You can change the default size and the cell spacing and the margin and things like the margin You can change things like the size the cell spacing in the margin If you wanted to also change the text blink mode and the custom font If you wanted to implement a custom font outside of the terminal or the system font You could do that you can change the cursor and you can change what the notification sound is And then there's a ton of others everything here. You can change it if you wanted to Set a certain profile to to run a different shell So if you wanted to use fish for some profiles if you wanted to use just zsh for other profiles You could do that and you can also change your color scheme here Now one of the things that I don't really care for all that much because just because it's kind of doesn't really fit in Is that the best way to get a different color scheme that someone else makes is to actually put them in a file so the way you actually import a color scheme is by importing a json file into slash users share tylix and schemes and I don't care for json files like whatsoever But it is possible to say you wanted a color scheme for like a One dark or something like that you could probably find that on the internet somewhere And download that in a json file and then just put it in this folder and it would then appear in the preferences Which is nice So it is possible to do that But I wish that while you were in This screen here you could just import it this way It'd be a little bit easier instead of having to always look and see where that directory happens to be You can obviously change the way that Tylix handles scrolling And then a few other things as well. There's there's settings for different keyboards and encoding and stuff like that I'm not sure why the encoding is both global and based on in a profile So you can change it in both places Maybe it's like a default and then if you wanted to have a profile where the encoding is different I suppose that that makes sense So as you can tell there's a ton of of settings here Just like you'd expect and one of the things that I like about it is that it's all in a gooey now I I have been a strong proponent of a terminal based lifestyle for a very long time And as I've been talking about in my blog posts, if you haven't seen those Since I've switched to xfc, I've found myself gravitating more towards gooey settings managers and settings panels and all the stuff, right? I've been spending less and less time in the terminal, which is ironic given that I'm doing a terminal based video right now But one of the things I like about tylics so much is that it does have a lot of gooey features So it just kind of fits in with the rest of the way my workflow has gone over the last You know two weeks or so So tylics has been a very good terminal Outside of all the features and the splits and the tabs and stuff like that So I can I can show you what it looks like to open up a tab. That's basically just a tab But honestly tylics has just fit so well in my workflow over the course of the last two weeks And I've had a really good time theming it and just using it overall. It's been really fast I haven't noticed it being really slow like you'd expect a more gooey type Terminal to be I've just found it to be a very Good terminal to use and if I were to compare it to alacrity, which has been my home for the last two years I would say actually like this a little bit better And it's not that I didn't like configuring alacrity I did but I don't like yaml and alacrity's configuration file is yaml And I've always had problems with all that stupid spacing. So it was You know, it's I don't have to deal with any of that stuff here now It doesn't mean that that way of configuring a terminal is bad. It's just I like this a little bit better. I don't I would say that if you are more interested in customizing a terminal Alacrity or kitty or st or whatever are probably way more customizable than tilex is because you are Very much limited in terms of what you can do to customize this based on that gooey And that means that you you take what they give you right Whereas with like st or alacrity or kitty or whatever They tend to have a lot more features when it comes to actually configuring in a configuration file. So I don't think that I'm going to sway a lot of people who use a tiling window manager to switch to something that has borders By default, even those those can be turned off And has a gooey settings panel But I do think that if you use a desktop environment Specifically if you use a gtk desktop environment, this is a very good Terminal emulator and I don't think that I would leave it behind again now unless I go back to a tiling window manager I don't And that's really where I want to leave this is that if I did go back to a tiling window manager The question I have for myself is would I switch away from tile x and go back to something like alacrity or kitty or something like that? And I don't know the answer to that. I think I'll have to wait to see You know when that happens what I end up doing because there kitty has tabs and Obviously if you're in a tiling window manager doing splits is really easy But alacrity as far as I know does not have tabs and unless I never found out that functionality If it does that'd be pretty cool But I have found myself using the tabs functionality A lot now that if you watch to my channel for any amount of time You'll know that I'm a tabs guy like I have I don't I don't know like 20 tabs and crusader open right now It's absolutely nuts. I have about 60 tabs open in firefox right now So I'm a tabs guy and adding tabs to my terminal is like, oh, that's really cool You know, it's not as if tabs in terminals is anything new But I hardly have ever used one that has tabs and now that I have used one that has tabs I'm pretty happy about it So the tabs functionality and the splits functionality both of those things have been really really cool In xfce. I don't think that I'd use the split functionality as much if I were back in a tiling window manager So whether or not I switch back when I switch to a tiling window manager or switch to a different terminal I mean, I'm not sure it's going to depend on how much I value tabs So that's tylix if you have thoughts on tylix you can leave those in the comment section below I really do think that this is one of the better terminal emulators out there. It just has a ton of features It's very very stable. It's very very fast It has the splits and the tabs work really really well and because you can customize where the tabs and stuff go How the splits actually work? It's just a super customizable Terminal emulator and I really like that and it fits really really well inside of xfc So I highly if you use a desktop environment, you should definitely give it a try if you have thoughts on Tylix you can leave those in the comment section below. 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