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.
I've been using WezTerm for a while for the lack of a better alternative, but the current state of Wayland support in it is absolutely terrible. For example, I just changed my terminal font and I wasn't able to start WezTerm until I changed back to the previous font.
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.
My number 1 issue with iTerm is that it doesn’t have a usable, plain text configuration format. I want to be able to configure my tools in plain text AND in a UI. iTerm forces me to use the UI (or import a config file, but it’s not very practical).
Wezterm apparently uses Lua so it will likely never have a UI. I don’t understand why a config file would ever need programming constructs, give me JSON or YAML, not Lua.
Custom settings depending on the environment you're in, here setting up PowerShell on windows only. Allowing the same flexibility through JSON/YAML would not be as easy and simple.
I don't know, IMO it would be better solved by profiles, environment specific settings (eg. settings.json + settings.windows.json), or override keys, eg:
I know using a full fledged programming language is infinitely more flexible, but I'm not sure a config needing infinite flexibility is a sign of good design.
If they want to stick with Lua I think they should allow both: write your config in JSON for the 99% of config that is easy, and allow to modify and return an updated config in Lua. TBH I just downloaded Wezterm a few minutes ago and got bored just wanting to add a Cmd+K shortcut to clear the buffer.
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...
On a slower machine, 100ms latency is achievable, which becomes perceptible (not yet annoying). Output speed can be visibility sluggish if you add too much highlighting and stuff.
I haven't touched iTerm for several years; maybe the modern versions are intrinsically faster, and modern hardware is definitely much.faster, so this could have become imperceptible.
Hmm... there was a time lime 3-4 years ago where there was some slowdown (but I was on beta) but it was fixed.
Nowadays I'm on MBP M1 (so already "older-ish" machine) and it works fine. I definitely notice latency when I'm connecting to a machine with ping over ~70ms so I assume that if I don't notice any delay then latency is low (?)
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.
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.
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.
If GTK+libadwaita is "native" for linux, then give me a custom UI. I grew up in the 80s and 90s and remember when every program rolled its own UI. It sucked, but modern GTK is in many ways worse.
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.
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.
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.
I connect to serial ports a lot in what I do, and never really understood why this should be handled by the terminal emulator. Much better done with eg. picocom, python serial.tools.miniterm or the like.
I feel like I'm missing something, too. I use iTerm and XFCE Terminal... Speed is something I never think about in my usage. I tried going back to Xterm just to see how blazingly fast it was and I couldn't really tell much difference. Maybe I'm just not attuned. :)
