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How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

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Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#11

Post by prmph »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #2

Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)? There is probably something I am missing not using GPU backed rendering, but I don’t know what I don’t know.

All I know is that on MacOS iTerm2 is unmatched. Every few months I go in search of something similar to it (as a backup), and every single time, after trying countless terminals, I give up. The closest I've found is WezTerm, and even that is a pale shadow of Iterm2

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#14

Post by gsinclair »

prmph wrote: post #11
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #2

Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)? There is probably something I am missing not using GPU backed rendering, but I don’t know what I don’t know.

All I know is that on MacOS iTerm2 is unmatched. Every few months I go in search of something similar to it (as a backup), and every single time, after trying countless terminals, I give up. The closest I've found is WezTerm, and even that is a pale shadow of Iterm2

I switched from iTerm to WezTerm and haven’t looked back. It feels faster and it’s simpler to configure. I only have a basic use case, though, as tmux does all the heavy work for me. People with an appetite for more features might legitimately prefer iTerm, but I can’t endorse the comment “pale shadow of iTerm” for all use cases.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#15

Post by zeppelin101 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #2

Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)? There is probably something I am missing not using GPU backed rendering, but I don’t know what I don’t know.

I have a very silly primary reason for preferring the Kitty terminal - I configured it to look very minimalistic and compact. It doesn't even have the customary app titlebar at the top. The other benefit is that it's actually a lot faster to start up than Terminal.app when you first invoke it. I know iTerm2 is really well-liked, but to me, it gave the "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" vibes.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#17

Post by weinzierl »

WezTerm is great. When I switched back to Linux from Apple there were very few things I missed. iTerm2 was one of them, but since I found WezTerm I am pretty happy.

I tried to use it on Windows as well but unfortunately the Antivirus freaks out on it. When I looked into it it was because of a small utility `strip-ansi-escapes` which is so simple that even I could see that it is a false positive. I tried to report it to Microsoft and other Antivirus companies with some success but in the end I gave up an this Sisyphus task.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#18

Post by pksebben »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #10
corytheboyd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently decided to replace iterm2 with wezterm when I started moving macbook over to nix. iterm2 is about the only one that didn’t work well for this, since you can’t source control the configuration (import/export doesn’t cut it) Any of the ones you mentioned would probably work good with nix too. I don’t really care about the config being scriptable at all, it was just the first terminal that easily let me…

iTerm2 does support source control; I've got my settings in a git repo managed by Chezmoi. In the settings dialog, under "General" -> "Settings", there's an "External settings: Load settings from a custom folder or URL" option.

I've also gone wez from iterm2, and you hit upon why. Don't ever make me click on things. I can't script => modify => export clicking on things. When you make me click on things, you've defined my interface for me, which I did not ask for.

I suppose I'm a bit of an extremist, though.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#19

Post by submeta »

WezTerm is an absolute joy to use: Scriptable (in Lua), allows creating your own shortcuts, has a command palette, has something like tmux (called mux) for which I have created lua scripts to setup my workspace for different projects. Something like tmuxinator impelemented in WezTerm. - I still use tmux, but mux is nice as well, and I can use splits and navigation natively in WezTerm, no need for prefix-{command} like in tmux. But can have workspaces in WezTerm.

It allows adding a custom background image, also transparent background, and I can toggle all of that via my custom shortcuts: Transparent on/off, background image on/off/rotate randomly.

It is such a joy to use and so beautiful. That plus neovim, yazi file browser, and lazygit: Dreamteam. Best dev environment I ever had.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#20

Post by keithnz »

weinzierl wrote: post #17

WezTerm is great. When I switched back to Linux from Apple there were very few things I missed. iTerm2 was one of them, but since I found WezTerm I am pretty happy. I tried to use it on Windows as well but unfortunately the Antivirus freaks out on it. When I looked into it it was because of a small utility `strip-ansi-escapes` which is so simple that even I could see that it is a false positive. I tried to report it…

I have zero problem with WezTerm on Windows.
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