I'm missing WezTerm from that comparison image/slide posted in the article. Been using WezTerm for almost two years now I think, and I could not be happier. Best terminal emulator hands down.
I second this. WezTerm is very fast (much faster than anything libvterm-based), very featureful (comparable to Kitty), and very configurable (comparable to Vim, if not Emacs itself). Showing fonts the way I like (and not he way macOS defaults to): check. Sending complex key combos as custom sequences: check. Palettes, mouse support, system clipboard support: all check. Selection and search mode: check. Linux, MacOS, and even Windows support: all check!
I wish Ghostty all the luck, because the current state of terminal emulators is a pretty high bar to clear.
Looking forward to this! Had been lurking in the discord for a while but never talked much so I never was able to get a beta key. The Terminal Inspector seems super cool and is what I'm most excited to try out. Seems like it'd be really useful for Bubble Tea [0] apps which I've been having run writing.
Can I click on paths to have them opened in my editor of choice? That's the killer feature that always brings me back to iTerm: clicking on paths in the output of various command line tools to directly jump to the line in e.g. source code.
iTerm runs a command with filename, line number, pwd etc. as parameters when you click a path. You can use so called shell extensions to let iTerm add hostname and user to those parameters. I usually grab those and point my editor to the appropriate share or sshfs mount. With vim you can seamlessly use rsync or scp.
Can someone explain why iTerm is listed as "not fast" here? iTerm has been my primary terminal for over a decade and I keep coming back after trying alternatives like Warp, Hyper or Alacritty. And speed or snappy-ness were never an issue with iTerm.
Try opening a fullscreen terminal and cat a long file. Add search / highlighting, repeat. Type something really fast; sometimes you can even notice the input lag, especially if you enable ligatures and other features.
Install WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty; try the same.
It's not that iTerm is not fast enough for most daily work. It's not that iTerm's feature set is not great. But there are faster alternatives, and in many cases, the difference is pronounced.
I just opened iTerm and started bashing keys on my keyboard randomly and there wasn't any lag. For me, for all intents and purposed it just fast.
Cat a long-ish (10k lines, I know it's not that log but don't have anything longer at hand) and search with highlight and there wasn't any lag (and I'm quite alergic to it).
BUT. I don't have any fancy shell prompt nor ligatures (don't see any point) and there is a warning that enabling said ligatures will impact performance...
Excited for this. I’ve played around with iTerm alternatives but always came back because the replacements never felt native, which ultimately slowed down my workflow more than the speed boosts helped.
I've been daily driving Ghostty for over a year now, and have been a somewhat regular contributor. As a TUI library author, I've worked with several terminal authors on bug fixes and implementing features - Mitchell is among the nicest to work with. Happy to see this project launch as 1.0!
Ghostty has my daily driver for a good while now, I’ve been super happy with it. It’s been especially fun watching Mitchell deftly build a community at just the right speed for its development stage. Thank you for all your hard work and responsiveness.
How does this compare to Tera Term? I thought that was supposed to be the best terminal emulator? I just seen it mentioned in some PDP restoration videos.
Excited to try this! Hoping it is fairly low-configuration; a lot of the iTerm alternatives seem to require more configuration than I care to do in order to make them look halfway decent.
Can it connect to a serial port? I need a terminal to connect to a UART on embedded devices. This should be basic functionality on any terminal, but many don't seem to have it, they're just fancy local shells.
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