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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

#251

Post by pmontra »

tmtvl wrote: post #217
pmontra wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's always Ctrl+Insert for copy and Shift+Insert for paste. I know that there's some laptops lacking an insert key, which is terrible, but for keyboard with an insert key the Ctrl/Shift + Insert combos are useful at times.

Especially because one does not have to push three keys with the same hand, which is not nice to tendons. I think I did that for a while time ago, then forgot about it. Thanks.

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

#252

Post by hnlmorg »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #143
hnlmorg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Terminal is a lot like Internet Explorer in the 00s: for power users it’s only purpose is an interface to install something else which doesn’t suck.

I used IE back in the 00s (up until Chrome came out), and I certainly was a power user. I liked it just fine. I think that it's a matter of personal preference rather than something sucking (or not).

I was clearly being flippant. But IE definitely sucked.

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

#254

Post by hnlmorg »

altairprime wrote: post #113
hnlmorg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Terminal is a lot like Internet Explorer in the 00s: for power users it’s only purpose is an interface to install something else which doesn’t suck.

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…

> Perhaps your definition of power user is limited to uses aligned with your own?

I was clearly being flippant. Terminal.app does suck but if you’re happy in it then I’m not going to judge.

For what it’s worth, I cut my teeth on very limited terminals of the 80s and 90s too.

But I ended up writing my own terminal emulator because I wasn’t entirely happy with any of the options available these days.

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

#255

Post by [deleted] »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #142
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.

Honestly, I had never even heard of it before this very thread. It doesn't seem all that useful to me, but I don't truthfully know how much or how little I would use it in practice.

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by pseudalopex »

altairprime wrote: post #113
hnlmorg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Terminal is a lot like Internet Explorer in the 00s: for power users it’s only purpose is an interface to install something else which doesn’t suck.

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…

Where could I learn more of COMMO? How do current terminal emulators fall short? Wikipedia's article was minimal.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commo

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

#257

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

Unicode can be useful. The emoji subset generally are not.

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

#258

Post by j1elo »

teo_zero wrote: post #210
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!

It doesn't look so convenient to me. If Ctrl+v is bound to paste, how do you insert a verbatim character in the shell? How do you start a block visual selection in Vim? How do you scroll down in emacs?

Seems to me a reasonable concern but I'd bet it's only for a minority of users... so perfect candidate to have implemented, but given as a disabled by default setting.

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

#259

Post by mcswell »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #145
ubercow13 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems quite hard to avoid - file management such as running "ls" where any filename has any non-ascii character such as a CJK or accented letter - editing any text file in a terminal editor that isn't 100% ascii - viewing/printing any data from any source, such as a log file/the web/'curl'ing something, where any language other than English or non-ascii character is used - using various modern command line tools that…

Literally none of those is a situation I've ever encountered. I don't think it's as hard to avoid as you think.

All depends on what you're doing. When I worked in computational linguistics of languages that don't use ASCII (or European "accented" characters), I was very concerned with the display of non-ASCII Unicode scripts: Arabic, Devanagari, Thaana, Tamil, Chinese, even at one point Cambodian (which was extremely hard to render, even in XeLaTeX--it's improved since then). But at the moment, accented European characters are all I need.

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

#260

Post by phantasmish »

hnlmorg wrote: post #46
alkh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, mb, but I don't believe that's the case for Alacritty. As for the Apple Terminal, it is not great

Apple Terminal is a lot like Internet Explorer in the 00s: for power users it’s only purpose is an interface to install something else which doesn’t suck.

It's what I've used for years and it's entirely fine for me.

For a long time I installed iterm2 because "that's what you do" but one day I realized I was suffering a little wasted disk space, slightly slower start-up, and slightly worse input latency, for... no reason, because I didn't do anything with it that Terminal.app couldn't do.

25 years on unixy operating systems. Spend tons of time in the terminal.

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