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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

#21

Post by mechanicum »

skerit wrote: post #7

I see Ghostty does not support (and does not plan on adding support for) Sixels, instead preferring the Kitty image protocol. Now if the Kitty image protocol is so great and the Sixel stuff is so bad, ~~why is it only used in Kitty and Ghostty?~~ *Edit: it's also supported in Konsole, WezTerm, ... but still I'm interested in why we have 2 competing protocols right now.

More than two, e.g. there’s also the Inline Images Protocol supported by iTerm2 and WezTerm.

Kovid documented his rationale at some length here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/33

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

#22

Post by ziotom78 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #9
skerit wrote: post #7

I see Ghostty does not support (and does not plan on adding support for) Sixels, instead preferring the Kitty image protocol. Now if the Kitty image protocol is so great and the Sixel stuff is so bad, ~~why is it only used in Kitty and Ghostty?~~ *Edit: it's also supported in Konsole, WezTerm, ... but still I'm interested in why we have 2 competing protocols right now.

> Now if the Kitty image protocol is so great and the Sixel stuff is so bad, why is it only used in Kitty and Ghostty? Images as in "pictures" or is that something else? I'm using Alacritty, and I don't think I've once thought "I need to see this image inside the terminal" and I do deal with images and frames from videos a lot. Probably if I saw it being added to Alacritty I'd think it was adding unnecessary bloat, s…

I run Kitty and use this feature regularly. Most of the time, I rely on it within Yazi [1], a TUI file manager, but I can also display plots within the Julia REPL, thanks to the KittyTerminalImages.jl package [2]. It's even more crucial when I'm navigating a remote directory and need to check an image file, as I usually have timg [3] installed on those servers. Once you discover how valuable this is, it becomes a permanent part of your workflow.

[1] https://yazi-rs.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl

[3] https://github.com/hzeller/timg

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

#27

Post by IshKebab »

skerit wrote: post #7

I see Ghostty does not support (and does not plan on adding support for) Sixels, instead preferring the Kitty image protocol. Now if the Kitty image protocol is so great and the Sixel stuff is so bad, ~~why is it only used in Kitty and Ghostty?~~ *Edit: it's also supported in Konsole, WezTerm, ... but still I'm interested in why we have 2 competing protocols right now.

IMO none of them are particularly useful. Sixels is hilariously inefficient. Kitty is slightly better because you can send data as PNG, but ... you have to send image data as PNG!

I wish there was a high performance way of remoting graphics over SSH. How cool would it be if you could SSH to a remote machine and it just showed you the remote desktop in the terminal itself? No messing around with port forwarding, weird X servers, etc.

I think probably that requires a full fat video codec like H.264 to work well though. Or maybe RDP?

Probably too many GUI naysayers and "What's wrong with remote X?" for this to ever happen though.

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

#29

Post by duskwuff »

iammrpayments wrote: post #26

I would use neovide over anything else if they supported macos tabs. It’s the termianl with the best font readability for me.

Disappointingly, the native UI for tabbed windows on macOS changed drastically in Tahoe (26.0). I really dislike the new tabs - they're significantly larger, and much harder to integrate into a small window like a terminal.

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

#30

Post by temp0826 »

Asooka wrote: post #13

I wonder how long until terminals support half of the XWindows protocol (as some weird combination of Markdown, HTML and escape codes, most probably). This is not a diss, I would actually be pretty happy with a pared-down GUI protocol in the terminal with extensive Unicode support.

There is an in-terminal wayland compositor (or two?) out there, fwiw.

Edit- one example https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything

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