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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

#241

Post by phantasmish »

torben-friis wrote: post #219
taftster wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do you dislike about cmd placement? I feel the opposite, the near-thumb position for the most used modifier is a godsend vs pinky strain. Ctrl in caps lock is debatably better but that key is arguably better used for esc in vim setups (or the harder to setup “ctrl if held, esc if tapped”).

cmd is brilliant. I have to shift my entire hand downward a little to hit ctr+c/ctrl-v, and make a pinkie-stretch that I can feel straining my hand. Cmd+c/v keeps three fingers on the home row, and involves just a slide-over of the thumb by maybe a centimeter. It's great.

caps-as-an-extra-ctrl helps with all of that, but leaves you with the problem of overlapping shortcuts in the terminal. Cmd also fixes that.

I hate how hard it is to get anything remotely like it working in Linux. All the solutions are partial and very janky.

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

#242

Post by biehl »

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!

That sounds like an awesome concept. However, I'm restarting Linux usage after 10 years on Mac, and I am surprised on how much less annoying the Shift-ctrl-v is compared to what I expected.

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

#243

Post by rovingeye »

usrbinbash wrote: post #235
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!

> So convenient! Running in tmux, marking anything on my terminal immediately puts it into the tmux buffer, without me having to click anything on the keyboard. Pressing middle-mouse pastes it. THAT is convenience.

I have that turned on in Windows Terminal but still use ctrl+c because it's how all other software works

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

#244

Post by Joker_vD »

> Kitty and Ghostty are the only terminals that correctly support Variation Selector 15,

Really? Because IIRC they "support" it by treating the preceding emoji character as being Narrow instead of Wide. This is completely unsupported by anything in the Unicode standards: the codepoint sequences that affect the East Asian Width of their first codepoints are explicitly enumerated, and none of them have emojis and/or VS-15 in it. So no, it's not "correctly" supported. Emojis are Wide (terminal width 2) with or without VS-15/VS-16, and if fonts have textual renditions of them that are only 1 cell wide, well, that's the fonts' problems, just as fonts that have e.g. glyphs for Playing Cards block with visible width of 1.5 (I am looking at you, Google Noto) are wrong too.

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

#245

Post by ur-whale »

usrbinbash wrote: post #235
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!

> So convenient! Running in tmux, marking anything on my terminal immediately puts it into the tmux buffer, without me having to click anything on the keyboard. Pressing middle-mouse pastes it. THAT is convenience.

> immediately puts it into the tmux buffer

Can you paste in a non-terminal app though (like a web browser) ?

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

#246

Post by ur-whale »

ghosty141 wrote: post #203
h3x4d3c4 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this was available from the beginning, but Ghostty has the ability to do exactly that with what they call "performable" keybindings https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind#performable: >

Oh wow, I'm already using ghostty and didn't know about this. It works great, thanks!

Ooh, seconded, will try right away.

[EDIT]: so ... tried it ... very, very nice BUT:

what of CTRL-V ???

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

#247

Post by cosmic_cheese »

phantasmish wrote: post #241
torben-friis wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you dislike about cmd placement? I feel the opposite, the near-thumb position for the most used modifier is a godsend vs pinky strain. Ctrl in caps lock is debatably better but that key is arguably better used for esc in vim setups (or the harder to setup “ctrl if held, esc if tapped”).

cmd is brilliant. I have to shift my entire hand downward a little to hit ctr+c/ctrl-v, and make a pinkie-stretch that I can feel straining my hand. Cmd+c/v keeps three fingers on the home row, and involves just a slide-over of the thumb by maybe a centimeter. It's great. caps-as-an-extra-ctrl helps with all of that, but leaves you with the problem of overlapping shortcuts in the terminal. Cmd also fixes that. I hate…

It’s a sentiment I’ve expressed many times here on HN, but I’d love to see a DE and matching set of apps designed to embrace Mac-like UX, including meta-based key shortcuts. It being like that out of the box instead of requiring a patchwork of spotty config changes and hacks brings massive value.

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

#249

Post by ghosty141 »

ur-whale wrote: post #246
ghosty141 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, I'm already using ghostty and didn't know about this. It works great, thanks!

Ooh, seconded, will try right away. [EDIT]: so ... tried it ... very, very nice BUT: what of CTRL-V ???

You can do the same with ctrl+v, just use paste_from_clipboard

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

#250

Post by pseudalopex »

epolanski wrote: post #108
hnlmorg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using various modern command line tools that insist on printing emojis in their output Ugh. Unpopular opinion this but I personally find this practice repugnant. Same for when used in git commit messages, CI/CD task names and other such places. It just cheapens the quality of the product in my opinion Graphical characters and symbols like ticks I’m fine with. I have no objection to people wanting to make the termin…

Emojis are useful as visual indicators, there's anything from flags to check marks in them. They can be super helpful to decorate CLI output. If it feels juvenile but is helpful (as in many cases is) good. Sure, some CLIs may over do with rockets and such, but any tools can misused.

I want country codes not flags. And check marks do not require emoji.

Every emoji I saw in a terminal or Git commit message was worse than alternatives. This included emoji intended for information not fun. Color made them distracting when the wanted information was anything else. A monochrome font could not solve this because most emoji are too complex to display clearly at normal text sizes without color. They were cumbersome to grep. (Uncommon Unicode characters would have this problem also.) Many had unclear meanings.

Use emoji in your CLIs if you desire. But make them optional. Opt in ideally.

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