I have been using the XFCE terminal for decades now and it has always been good enough.

However there was one thing that was starting to bug me. I usually prefer my terminal light on dark. It's what most tools expect and what usually looks best.

However, when the weather is nice, I enjoy sitting outside in the garden while I work. And a black terminal is just too hard to read in bright daylight.

XFterm allows you to switch the color palette, but the contrasts of the predefined light modes never really worked for me, and switching the palette was always kinda fiddly. So I started looking for alternatives:

• easy switching between dark and light mode
• proper support for a scaled resolution display
• tabs, with the mechanism to pull out a tab to create a new window from it
• no need to fiddle with config files for hours

The terminal that ticked all those boxes is ptyxis.

It's in the arch repositories and basically worked right out of the box. With several available themes (I am using “VS Code”) that define a light and dark mode and big friendly buttons to switch the mode right in the preference menu.

I only hit two minor gotchas:

1. At first the new tab icon was invisible. This turned out to be an issue with the elementary icon theme I was using. Switching to the Papirus icons fixed the problem
2. XFCE's terminal shortcut did not open a new terminal window but focused the already existing one

The latter was fixed by using the –new-window option.

~/.local/share/xfce4/helpers/custom-TerminalEmulator.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
NoDisplay=true
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=X-XFCE-Helper
X-XFCE-Category=TerminalEmulator
X-XFCE-CommandsWithParameter=ptyxis --new-window "%s"
Icon=ptyxis
Name=ptyxis
X-XFCE-Commands=ptyxis --new-window

BTW. the terminal is the only app where I prefer the dark mode. Everything else is light by default. That's why I did not look into switching the whole desktop but explicitly wanted a terminal that supported switching on it's own.