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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

#171

Post by altairprime »

jjwiseman wrote: post #168
altairprime wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a decrepit old {COMMO} power user, anything that doesn’t give me fully integrated scripting with expect/switch/dialog and a popup script editor, honestly hasn’t been worth investing in further. So I’ve been on Linux console, Putty, and macOS Terminal ever since. My terminal.app color scheme uses P3 colors on 7% gray rather than the usual sRGB colors so that I can use an OKLCH equidistant palette, and I make extens…

Oh wow, I haven't thought of COMMO in decades.

I think of it every time I see 'ansible' come up, because the ability to create and run what everyone calls 'playbooks' now should have beeen integrated into the terminal like it was back in the 80s over dialup. I'm all for being able to git commit the resulting script (they’re just text files!) but being able to launch a playbook and halt it and repair it and resume was, like.

Sigh.

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

#173

Post by __float »

klooney wrote: post #105
mort96 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I'm missing from ghostty is scrollback search. It's planned AFAIU, I hope it gets there eventually. Otherwise, ghostty has been pretty good. (I know you can fake scrollback search with tmux. It's not the same.)

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

There are a ton of people who _immediately_ open tmux/zellij/etc. when they're doing anything in the terminal. This means you use its backscroll and search feature, and you wouldn't notice.

@mitchellh seems to rely on the Ghostty feature to dump scrollback to a file, and edit/search over that.

I found it a bit too inconvenient when using remote systems frequently, though. (If I'm missing a trick, I'd love to use Ghostty! But I'm just not a fan of multiplexers.)

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

#174

Post by charcircuit »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #153
shirro wrote: post #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 st…

For glyph width, there are codepoints classified as ambiguous width. These are mostly narrow pre-emoji symbols that have been extended with an alternate emoji representation. There's no way to predict what their width will be, even with explicit variation selectors which might just be ignored.

The terminal emulator knows what font is being used so it should be possible to predict it.

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

#175

Post by inejge »

taftster wrote: post #156
computably wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy and reasonably quick to set up key remapping (via Karabiner).

Yes, but specifically in the context of Terminals (as discussed in the original article), it's really convenient to be able send Ctrl-C (break) differently than Cmd-C (copy). So yes keyboard remapping is an option. But there's just differences you can't remap because of the extra meta keys on Mac (and I guess on Windows too, with the Copilot or Start keys in play).

> it's really convenient to be able send Ctrl-C (break) differently than Cmd-C (copy)

Right, and even on Linux you can do it by using the four-fifths forgotten CUA shortcut Ctrl-Insert for copy (and Shift-Insert for paste.) Although I'll admit to using Ctrl-Shift-C/V most of the time.

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

#177

Post by lelandbatey »

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.

This is also a thing in X, not only Wayland.

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

#178

Post by cosmic_cheese »

taftster wrote: post #154
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really do like Cmd key usage for any terminal in Mac. The ability to send Ctrl+C differently than Cmd+C in a Mac is joyous. However, for most all other applications in Mac, I dislike the Mac command key. Especially in IDEs like vscode, etc. And I really hate that the actual Ctrl key on a Mac is in the wrong place, having swapped places with Fn. It's like the first thing I have to remember to do on each Mac setup, s…

On all my machines I remap Caps Lock to Control, and since I still use Control from time to time under macOS, I have muscle memory for it, and so switching between Control/Command dominance is low friction.

Control in its typical position however drives me crazy.

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

#179

Post by pmontra »

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.

That's an X11 thing that Wayland had to reimplement because it's so convenient. The problem is when pasting into the terminal something that another program copied into the clipboard. That's ctrl-shift-c.

I thought about remapping copy and paste to their own keys, possibly a single one. Maybe on the number pad, which I never use. Or remapping ctrl-c.

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

#180

Post by qart »

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 have them all installed, but I use WezTerm most often because it is fastest to give me a window when I hit the assigned shortcut key. Ghostty is a hair slower. Kitty takes 2-3 seconds. I keep launching terminals pretty frequently, so this matters to me a lot. The only other feature that it must have is truecolor.
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