 It has been some time since I've taken a look at a new terminal emulator and for pretty good reason I've found myself pretty attached to Alacrity over the last year and a half or so and I don't see that changing anytime soon because Alacrity is just really really good. With that being said of course that doesn't stop me from taking a look at a new terminal emulator when I find one to take a look at and that's what we're gonna do today. The terminal emulator that we're gonna be taking a look at today is called Blackbox and this is fairly new and it is a GTK 4 terminal so you can expect this to run the best on GNOME or at least the newest versions of GNOME and the reason why the GTK 4 part is important is because it allows it to have some interesting theming features. Now I'm not gonna say it has a ton of customization because it really doesn't. There are a ton of terminals out there with GUI settings managers that have way more options than this does. So if you're looking for full fledged customizability in a GUI similar to what you'd get with like Terminator or something like that you're gonna be disappointed and even compared to the GNOME terminal that comes installed with Fedora it has fewer options than that. So just no going in that this is a fairly new project so there's going to be some limitations when it comes to the number of settings that you have access to. With that being said it does have some interesting things that it has implemented so let's go ahead and take a look at it. So this is what Blackbox looks like out of the box and there's not much to write home about in terms of you like design I mean it looks like a terminal what do you want from this thing but the cool thing about it is that if you go here into the preferences it allows you to have access to a few themes. Now you can get more themes than just this you have to get them from their online repository or whatever and that's a cool that's good that they've allowed you to expand access to different themes and I like how they show you the preview of what the theme looks like so you can change the theme and it changes real time so it would be cool if you could actually move this settings thing away from the terminal which you can't it stays right there whether you want it to or not you move this you move the whole thing around which is just a little weird because these look like separate windows but they're not actually separate windows the cool thing here is that when you select a theme the whole window changes so you can see how the theme kind of goes outside of the normal terminal space and includes the border as well so that's kind of cool so if you like the solarized thing you can use the solarized thing you can also choose other themes like the dark ones work like that and this one here is a little bit different as well so as you can see the theme kind of propagates throughout the entire application except for the menus for whatever reason it would be cool if the menus would also kind of change color but I'm assuming that's a genome thing that's just not something that they can actually change probably not now other than the theming thing which is what I found the most interesting because of course I did it does have some other options so you can choose whether or not to expand the tabs which is something that I would prefer to be completely off because when you have a tab that runs across the entire title bar up here you can't use that to drag the window it just drags the tab so you have to drag over here so if the expanded tabs are on which is they are by default if you select this part here if you try to drag the window here by the tab doesn't actually work instead you have to do this little piece over here in order to drag the window around which is kind of annoying other preferences you can show the menu button show the header bar you can play around with some of the floating controls so show floating controls and header header header barless mode that's not a word by the way header barless mode that means that you can turn off the header bar so if you wanted to use this like so turn this off you then have something more of like a terminal emulator that you'd see in a like tiling window manager which is cool now you can get back to the preferences by then by right clicking we can turn that header bar back on and you can have some control over what's shown when you are in that header barless mode you can control the scroll bars which means you can show the scroll bars or show turn them off which is always a good option you can have it so that remembers the window size when you close it and open it back up the window size stays the same and then you get into some of the more normal stuff you can control in most every terminal things like the font the cell spacing the padding which is always nice because a lot of terminals you don't have actual control over the padding unless you get into the configuration file you can change the cursor from block to I beam probably and underline yep those are the options easy copy and paste so you can change it to control plus seeing control V instead of control shift C control shift V I wouldn't recommend ever turning that on frankly get used to control shift C control shift V you're gonna be much happier because when you go to a different terminal chances are control shift V control shift C are gonna be what you're gonna need instead of the regular control C control V you'll just find yourself being upset if you change it to this and get used to this and not have it in another terminal and then there are a couple advanced options so you can share on pixel scrolling so scroll by pixel units instead of scrolling by lines I'm not actually sure why you'd want that but you know it's there if you want the only other advanced option is to reset all the preferences back to normal this is just reverse it back to the default settings why that really has to be in advanced I'm not sure but probably probably just don't want you to hit by accident or something so those are all the settings really you there's no multiple profile support here as far as I can tell in terms of actually like you can't choose have profiles that have different fonts as far as I'm aware like that's something you can do and get on terminal really easily and in most other terminals as well this one you can't be that it's not there yet so if that's something that you need this is not going to be an option for you so let's talk about a few of the things that I've noticed that using this just for a little while the first thing you'll notice let's run Neofetch here like so watch oh yeah that's pretty slow so if we run a time on that so time Neofetch yeah that's that was pretty slow let me open up a terminal on my computer here like open up here do time Neofetch like so yeah you can tell that was much faster and you can see those numbers there those are just significantly faster than they were in blackbox now it's possible that this reason why this is slower is because it's in a virtual machine so I don't want to bash it too much for being slow and then have it be because I didn't give this enough RAM it has 4 gigabytes so you wouldn't think it'd be that big of a problem but you never know you know it has four cores so whatever the so it is slow and I noticed that when I ran an update it with DNF it made DNF even slower than DNF normally is so that's definitely a thing so you know what to use this you'd kind of have to put up with that and I don't know whether or not this is going to happen again or not but when I opened up blackbox for the first time oh yeah that was much faster although you can see it's still spinning up there and it's still loading I'm not sure why it's loading it's still usable but the first time I loaded it up it loaded slower than a snap does like it was a really slow to load I'm not sure why it continues to have a spinning circle up there next to the name for quite some time after you launch it something is going on there it really should not be that slow so let me open up the normal terminal here like so and you can see that's almost instantaneous it doesn't have any circles up there and it allows you to drag just like you would normally and this is a very full-featured terminal emulator so there's some you can tell that this is a new project I don't want to be too bashy on it it's it's slow the default drag points here are really really small so I would really wish that they didn't have that expanded tab by default they should turn that off and the lack of profile support is still something that I come back to is it really kind of needs because I'm gonna a lot of people use those profile things when they're gonna use a terminal like this there that profile support is pretty important to a lot of people so that is black box there's not a lot to this but I just wanted to cover it because we're gonna see more and more GTK for stuff come out over the next year so actually let me show you something like this look at there I'm I wasn't even doing anything in that thing popped up like I don't know why but it did so there's this thing has some problems so yeah anyways like I said we're gonna see more and more GTK for stuff come out over the next year or two as GTK for matures and gets adopted more by more than just you know as thing as desktop environments like matei and cinnamon adopt GTK for we're gonna see more and more GTK for applications and that's why I wanted to kind of cover this to see to kind of show you what GTK for application looks like from someone that's not a genome developer so that is it for this video if you have comments on this you can leave those in the comment section below you can follow me on Twitter at the 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