GNOME Gets A New Terminal Choice: Prompt

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop.

In recent months Hergert has also been working on improvements to the VTE terminal emulator library and porting GNOME Terminal to GTK4 among other performance work. He ended up developing Prompt as a new terminal built atop the VTE library. He describes Prompt as "marries the best of GNOME Builder’s seamless container support, the beauty of GNOME Text Editor, and the robustness of VTE. I like to think of it as a companion terminal to Builder."

Nearly a decade ago he first prototyped a possible terminal for the GNOME Build integrated development environment while recently took to developing Prompt as a container-focused and Flatpak-first terminal emulator.

Those wanting to learn more about Prompt can do so via Christian's blog. Trying out Prompt on Flatpak-enabled Linux distributions is as easy as flatpak install --user --from https://nightly.gnome.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Prompt.Devel.flatpakref.