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State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

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Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#121

Post by Shadowmist »

sevg wrote: post #115
klooney wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a contingent that just doesn't use scroll back search, which I find kind of baffling.

I’ve never used scrollback search, and it was a discovery for me that there’s a contingent that are very vocal in their demands for scrollback search. I can see why someone would feel attached to this feature though. Mostly I’m looking forward to seeing it implemented so I can stop reading complaints about this being missing in every thread about ghostty!

I wish they didn’t lock the GitHub issue so that we could see how many thousands more reactions it would get.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#122

Post by jscyc »

zadjii wrote: post #40

No love for Windows Terminal? I know that linux has a much richer terminal ecosystem, but WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now. Could anyone have imagined that 10 years ago?

It's what I most miss from using windows. It handles tabs, theming and renaming of windows so well. Being able to tell at a glance what each window is connected to, it's purpose etc is very handy for me.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#123

Post by sigmonsays »

greggh wrote: post #25
scuderiaseb wrote: post #3

Nothing even mentioned on WezTerm really?

People still use WezTerm when we have Kitty and Ghostty? Can you explain why? I'm actually interested to know what would make someone make that choice.

I prefer WezTerm over ghosttty and kitty.

I prefer it's UI and level of customization.

Ghostty animations run like crap for me on linux (not sure why).

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#124

Post by tristan957 »

ac29 wrote: post #73
christophilus wrote: post #57

Foot is excellent. Wayland only, but it is very fast to launch, and uses few resources. I love it.

Yep this is my current favorite too. I liked ghostty when I evaluated it, but for some reason it uses an order of magnitude more memory than foot to display a single, empty terminal.

Ghostty uses GTK + GPU rendering while Foot uses Wayland primitives and CPU rendering.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#125

Post by tristan957 »

bsimpson wrote: post #38

The same part of me that is shy to install Chrome extensions is shy to try non-standard terminals. I'd like the thing I type my passwords into to be as trusted as possible. SteamOS comes with Konsole, so that's what I've got installed in Linux. What am I missing out on by not using e.g. Ghostty? (I know this article is about Unicode support, but I don't think I've ever had a hard time using a terminal because of its…

If Konsole suits your needs, there is no reason to move to Ghostty. You may find better performance or access to more terminal features, but if those don't move the needle for you, then it doesn't matter. Konsole is well integrated in to KDE.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#126

Post by stefanha »

j1elo wrote: post #117

Work had me using the Windows Terminal for the first time ever after a life of developing on Linux. I got immediately hooked on the smart Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (without needing to use Shift like on Linux!) For those not knowing, Windows Terminal uses Ctrl+C to abort the current process (as we'd expect) when nothing is selected , but copies when there is a selection. Similarly, Ctrl+V just pastes. So convenient!

In Linux (Wayland) you can copy text from the terminal without pressing Ctrl+C at all. Just select the text. To paste it in another Window, press the middle mouse button.

This is called the Primary Selection and is separate from the Clipboard (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V). IMO the Primary Selection is more convenient than the Clipboard.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#127

Post by yokljo »

sho_hn wrote: post #116

Pretty nice to see KDE's Konsole rank really high, especially if you take performance/test elapsed time into account. Considering it's a decades-older workhorse compared to the new star ghostty, not too shabby that it's kept up.

Agreed. It's nice to be able to just use the provided terminal when running KDE. It's very customisable and runs plenty fast. I also love being able to right click on Dolphin and tell it to open Konsole in the current folder. Also, I leave infinite scroll back turned on in Konsole and it works really well, swapping out to a file as it gets too much scroll back. Nothing worse than getting errors that I can't read because the terminal discarded them. I have Ctrl+Shift+X bound to clear everything, which I use before running just about any operation.

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#128

Post by j1elo »

stefanha wrote: post #126
j1elo wrote: post #117

Work had me using the Windows Terminal for the first time ever after a life of developing on Linux. I got immediately hooked on the smart Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (without needing to use Shift like on Linux!) For those not knowing, Windows Terminal uses Ctrl+C to abort the current process (as we'd expect) when nothing is selected , but copies when there is a selection. Similarly, Ctrl+V just pastes. So convenient!

In Linux (Wayland) you can copy text from the terminal without pressing Ctrl+C at all. Just select the text. To paste it in another Window, press the middle mouse button. This is called the Primary Selection and is separate from the Clipboard (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V). IMO the Primary Selection is more convenient than the Clipboard.

Yeah I know. I missed this for the first couple days, but didn't take much before forgetting it after the change to Windows. (anyway I keep using Linux at home)

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#129

Post by ctippett »

I appreciate this analysis is on the state of terminal emulators, but I'm curious how well the integrated terminals that come bundled in code editors/IDEs also perform. For example, where does Zed's integrated terminal fit in the rankings? VS Code (and its derivatives)? JetBrains, Sublime Text?

Re: State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

#130

Post by dgl »

unleaded wrote: post #111

It's interesting that none of the programs commonly known as "terminal emulators" actually emulate a terminal.. we can do that now though. https://zork.net/~st/jottings/Real-VT102-emulation-with-MAME... I would avoid doing the PTY thing and instead do this (works on WSL if MAME is the windows version): $ sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:1234,reuseaddr,fork EXEC:"/sbin/agetty -L - 9600 vt102",pty,setsid,ctty,stderr $ mame -nomou…

If MAME could support the VT525 (nearly the last terminal DEC made and unlike the previous DEC models it supports ANSI color) people might use it a bit more. It would be very useful for compatibility testing as there aren't many people with a real VT525! Last I looked someone had dumped the ROMs but there wasn't any support code.
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