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How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

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Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#31

Post by resonious »

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #29

Wezterm was great, but I had to stop using it recently because it keeps crashing immediately (across two different computers) on CachyOS/Arch :/ It's just broken on KDE permanently I guess :/ There have beem tickets about it, and there is an AUR repo with a patch that used to fix it... but :/ Was already worried about the project given that it hasn't seen a new release in quite a long time. Got the feeling that the m…

It's been almost a year for me now but I had also stopped using it due to crashes. And since it shares a process for all your windows, it would close all my windows which just drove me nuts after awhile.

Though for me, I only wanted the absolute bare minimum, which Alacritty covers. I was sad to lose ligatures, but Alacritty is stable and very fast.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#32

Post by alwillis »

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.

> Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)?

* They're very fast and the scrolling is very smooth, especially on a 120 Mhz (ProMotion) refresh rate on MacBook Pros.

* While TMUX runs on all of them, they have built-in multiplexing, so you terminal sessions without requiring TMUX.

* Super configurable and in some cases programable

* Excellent typeface support, including ligatures, which I liker

* A quality of life issue: you don't have to copy and paste URLs; you just right-click them in the terminal.

* Excellent typeface support

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#33

Post by alwillis »

tcoff91 wrote: post #24
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 really love the following things that I can do with kitty: - Access the scrollback buffer in neovim - Access the last command output in neovim - Animated cursor trails. It sounds dumb at first but I find that when sharing my screen, the cursor trails help other people keep track of my cursor when using neovim. Here are my configs to quickly load @screen_scrollback or @last_cmd_output in neovim map kitty_mod+z launc…

Gotta give a shoutout regarding Ghostty [1]. I keep switching terminal apps; I'm on an iTerm2 kick right now… but I used Ghostty for a while and it's pretty damn cool.

Anecdotally, it feels the fastest to me. Also GPU-accelerated and super configurable. It's amazing how a guy (Mitchell Hashimoto)[2] leaves the company he co-founded before it was sold to IBM.

[1]: https://ghostty.org

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qY2p0OH9A

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#34

Post by bbkane »

technojamin wrote: post #28

I love WezTerm! In the author's spirit of obsessive tweaking, here's a completely inconsequential configuration change I made. By default, WezTerm doesn't have a scrollbar, but you can easily enable it with: config.enable_scroll_bar = true But now you always have a scrollbar, just a big line on the side when there's no scrollback or you're in alternate screen mode. Horrible! So, here's an event handler that will auto…

Thanks, I've copied that into my config!

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#36

Post by bbkane »

I love WezTerm! The cross-platform config is easy to version control (unlike iTerm2) and I've added a couple integrations that I use constantly:

The first is hashing the working directory / (or remote hostname if I'm SSH'd into a host) to set tab title colors- much easier to find the right tab that way.

The second is writing a script to open tabs with in a certain order and set their titles. I don't use tmux, but this let's me recreate my preferred layout for projects quite easily.

See https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm if any of this sounds useful to you!

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#38

Post by barrkel »

I found wezterm pane resizing to be very glitchy, and using native panes along with the muxing server was about 80% of the reason I wanted to use it. But for whatever reason, maybe font related, the resizing logic is unstable and it gets into weird states, glitching and flickering etc. Nightly vs stable made bo difference.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#39

Post by natrys »

lawrencegripper wrote: post #16

Wezterm is a lot of fun. I played around with notifications and copy/paste which work even through ssh back to the host. https://blog.gripdev.xyz/2025/01/08/wezterm-easily-copy-text...

Wasn't aware of user-var-changed, cool write-up!

I had used urxvt forever before and the simple solution that works (even for ssh e.g.) is to ring the terminal bell, and urxvt just sets the window urgency hint upon that. I just do that in shell prompt unconditionally because if it's triggered in a focused window, then nothing happens. But if it's from a different workspace, I get this nice visual cue in my top bar for free.

But features like setting urgency isn't available in wezterm (understandable, as it's not a cross-platform thing). I could patch that in the source, but the Emacser in me chose to do something more unholy. By default Lua is started in safe mode, which means loading shared C module is forbidden. I disabled that, and now use a bunch of missing stuff written in Rust and Zig interfaced with cffi. Don't recall ever having a crash so I am surprised by some of the other comments.

Re: How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm

#40

Post by WD-42 »

resonious wrote: post #31
spoaceman7777 wrote: post #29

Wezterm was great, but I had to stop using it recently because it keeps crashing immediately (across two different computers) on CachyOS/Arch :/ It's just broken on KDE permanently I guess :/ There have beem tickets about it, and there is an AUR repo with a patch that used to fix it... but :/ Was already worried about the project given that it hasn't seen a new release in quite a long time. Got the feeling that the m…

It's been almost a year for me now but I had also stopped using it due to crashes. And since it shares a process for all your windows, it would close all my windows which just drove me nuts after awhile. Though for me, I only wanted the absolute bare minimum, which Alacritty covers. I was sad to lose ligatures, but Alacritty is stable and very fast.

Ghostty replaced wezterm for me, plus it supports ligatures and is just as fast as alacritty.
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