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State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

jeffquast.com

131–140 of 283 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always running tmux so it's not typically a feature I look for, but as you mention it doesn't seem to trigger a find for terminal scrollback. Wezterm doesn't do this either so maybe that's an iTerm thing. I always assume Ctrl keybindings will trigger emacs mode shortcuts in the tty. Update: Windows Terminal doesn't do it either.

I would love to use tmux. I have used yazi in the past and I really liked it but I was barely using it to its fullest potential. I think I have "skill issue" regarding tmux and I used to use hyprland (recently went to niri) and I just always preferred opening up another terminal I used to use (which was foot back when I was using my own config and it was alacritty on cachy/ idk what was on omarchy for the time I was…

tmux fits my personal use case better so I'll tell you why I use tmux and then if that resonates with you, then you might get value from that as well.

- It's generally bundled on most distros, or available for install in most default repositories.

- tmux sessions are available over ssh, so if I can continue where I left off over ssh (this is probably my main use case).

- I can full screen my terminal instead of having multiple terminals, and split in tmux. I usually split vim buffers, but then keep a terminal split beside it or in another tmux window.

- It's keyboard-driven, and universal across different window managers. Even if I switch from MacOS to Windows or to an X11 distro, tmux will still have the same keybinds using the same configuration language. I can also use vim keys to navigate the scrollback history.

- Its config language is simple enough for the modifications I personally need. I haven't felt that I need to learn the syntax beyond the basics.

- Knowing tmux is also a helpful skill for managing servers, which I do from time to time (my raspberry pi is still running a tmux session from when I last rebooted it).

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

#132
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!

Mac terminals yield a similar benefit, with the systemwide copy/paste Cmd+C/V not overlapping with Ctrl+C/V.

Being used to that, Linux terminals become rather annoying. Yes there's other ways under Linux, but they don't have 25+ years of muscle memory associated with them, and so when the key shortcuts don't work as expected it's like nails on a chalkboard.

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

#133
post #11

The terminal that comes with macOS version ends on the 29th place in the results.

Yeah, I don't understand. I spend my day in the macOS terminal app and the thought "Hey I'd like a better terminal" has never occurred to me.

Perhaps my needs are too pedestrian, but I don't believe I've ever needed anything more than what the macOS Terminal app is capable of. I've tried the vaunted iTerm2 and Ghostty among others but they never stuck.

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

#134
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!

windows terminal is awesome and i wish it shipped with windows by default instead of having to go to the store and install it. everyone who uses it has only good things to say, and it is updated regularly by Microsoft.

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

#135
post #127
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 beca…

> I also love being able to right click on Dolphin and tell it to open Konsole in the current folder.

This is a KDE thing; it'll open in whatever terminal you've got configured in Default Applications.

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

#136
post #36

I have been pretty happy with Alacritty for a while but just tried Ghostty and am a little bit mind-blown. The fact that it has a built-in theme picker is insanely convenient for people working on multiple computers at the same time(so the same theme might not work everywhere). Overall, it literally looks like a better Alacritty alternative. The creator(s) did a great job!

Same here. Any replacement I moved to needed to have content centering, where the margin around the cells is equal in both dimensions when the cells don't fit perfectly into the window. Kinda crazy that it's not a feature in a lot of terminals I checked over the years. I wouldn't even consider myself OCD, but it drove me nuts until I found a terminal that let me do it.

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

#138

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…

> You can do the same thing with a vt220.

Can you? The last I looked at it (a year or two ago), the vt220 in MAME was just the beginning skeleton of an implementation, and it doesn't seem to have been touched much since then. A shame, because AFAIK no "terminal emulator" implements vt220-style sixels (which are different than than the widely-implemented vt4xx-style sixels).

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

#139
Terminal emulators are caught between emulating terminals and teletypes of the past and implementing new features and unicode is one of the struggles. The way most terminals and wcwidth handle the width of characters sometimes is not correct but preserving behavior is important for compatibility. It is possible that its just not worth trying to handle all unicode perfectly in a terminal. Its pretty good for legacy stuff and sysadmin. We have other ways of doing things remotely like html that might be more appropriate for ZWJ emoji and languages with complicated text shaping/rendering.

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

#140
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!

Mac terminals yield a similar benefit, with the systemwide copy/paste Cmd+C/V not overlapping with Ctrl+C/V. Being used to that, Linux terminals become rather annoying. Yes there's other ways under Linux, but they don't have 25+ years of muscle memory associated with them, and so when the key shortcuts don't work as expected it's like nails on a chalkboard.

Heh, shortcut muscle memory is the reason I returned my Mac mini one week after trying it. I sure am not gonna remap my brain for apple after 20 years of Linux and windows.
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