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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

#271

Post by childintime »

These terminals properly handle single + double width fonts. But the same thing could work with single + half width fonts, so i,j,l,:,!,.,' and space would fit in half the width. Does anyone know of such a font? I searched but couldn't find any bi-spaced font with full/half width cells.

It would not only fit more text on a line, while (probably) also being nearly as pleasing as a proportional font, but it would also still perfectly align indents. I think it could be a great markdown font.

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

#272

Post by moderation »

aorth wrote: post #220
RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite confused why this article tests foot v1.16.2, which is two years old at this point. The latest version is 1.25.0. By contrast, the tested version of ghostty v1.2.3 is two weeks old.

Good point. I just submitted a pull request with new data for foot 1.25.0 https://github.com/jquast/ucs-detect/pull/17 . The test suite is really easy to run (and fast, foot rocks!).

Similarly kitty is at 0.44.0 [0], zutty at 0.16.0 [1]

0.https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases/tag/v0.44.0

1. https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git

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

#273

Post by sph »

anthk wrote: post #64
sph wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2052: the whole of computing is VT100-compatible Javascript CLI applications running on a Javascript port of the Linux kernel, within a tab of Chromium. This is the actual end game of the worse is better philosophy.

It's 9front actually. VT100 it's killed except for legacy plaforms, it's seen like CP/M and Altair emulators where looked upon 1995-2000. 9front's libc with a minimal desktop based on a tweaked rio(1) and a taskbar plus a really simple file manager won. People god fed up of FX' and bells and whistles everywhere. A minimal RTF editor with simple options plus a simple spreadsheet with rc/awk support does things much fa…

Ha! Your vision is positive, and idealistic. (Plan 9 is never make a come back, sorry to say)

My comment was sarcastic, and wishing that we at least tried to move away from UNIX, VT100 and mainframe-style computing; trying something new instead of continuously retreading old ground.

Gary Bernhardt said it best: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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

#274

Post by mmastrac »

dgl wrote: post #130
unleaded wrote: post #111

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…

If MAME could support the VT525 (nearly the last terminal DEC made and unlike the previous DEC models it supports ANSI color) people might use it a bit more. It would be very useful for compatibility testing as there aren't many people with a real VT525! Last I looked someone had dumped the ROMs but there wasn't any support code.

I've started working on a VT420 emulator which is about 70% complete: https://github.com/mmastrac/blaze

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

#275

Post by torben-friis »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #247
phantasmish wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the closest thing I know, not ideal but decent:

https://github.com/RedBearAK/Toshy

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

#276

Post by dgl »

p_l wrote: post #190
dgl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If MAME could support the VT525 (nearly the last terminal DEC made and unlike the previous DEC models it supports ANSI color) people might use it a bit more. It would be very useful for compatibility testing as there aren't many people with a real VT525! Last I looked someone had dumped the ROMs but there wasn't any support code.

VT5xx was the budget line with limited functionality, that's why only 525 among them supports ANSI color. The only fancy stuff was multisession (TD/SMP if you have all bits to support it) and "desktop accessories" like clock and calculator. The really interesting ones are VT340 variants with ReGIS and full SIXEL graphics

The VT3xx ones that were color did not support ANSI SGR to set them. I don't think VT5xx was a budget line, it has more escape sequences than the previous ones (including interesting ones like changing cursor shape, which modern terminals implement too). It's more that they never made a graphical version of the VT5xx (this was the early 90s, whether physical VTs made sense anymore is debatable, but terminal graphics likely didn't).

VT340 is definitely interesting and if someone were to emulate one that would also be great! (there's been some good research, e.g.: https://github.com/hackerb9/vt340test, which you might be surprised to learn has been used to make Windows Terminal one of the more conformant terminals...)

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

#277

Post by CoolCold »

chrysoprace wrote: post #102
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now the only feature I need in Ghostty is Windows support. I use ghostty on my mac but have you forgot about ctrl + f to find things support in ghostty (I don't think it has ctrl f support iirc right?)

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.

Ctrl+Shift+F on my Windows Terminal - don't remember, have I've adjusted it or it's default behavior

I see in config file, actions { "id": "User.find", "keys": "ctrl+shift+f" },

so probably I did

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

#278

Post by CoolCold »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #118
chrysoprace wrote: post #102

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…

it may happen that you just don't need it - the same way not everyone need to use vim/neovim.

without tmux/screen though, it's much harder, even less reliable, to work over ssh, so it becomes natural need for such sort of tools.

Say I use screen and later tmux since I believe ~ 2010 but not using "advanced" features like "panes" and screen splitting every month, most of the time for me it's just switching between windows in session and different sessions (not that often) and that's all.

As a helper, for some projects, I do use predefined layouts (say first 4 windows opens with inventory dir, other 2 with root folder of ansible repo) so on, but need this also not very often, like when laptop reboots (which is every ~ 3 week on Win11 nowdays)

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

#279

Post by p_l »

dgl wrote: post #276
p_l wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VT5xx was the budget line with limited functionality, that's why only 525 among them supports ANSI color. The only fancy stuff was multisession (TD/SMP if you have all bits to support it) and "desktop accessories" like clock and calculator. The really interesting ones are VT340 variants with ReGIS and full SIXEL graphics

The VT3xx ones that were color did not support ANSI SGR to set them. I don't think VT5xx was a budget line, it has more escape sequences than the previous ones (including interesting ones like changing cursor shape, which modern terminals implement too). It's more that they never made a graphical version of the VT5xx (this was the early 90s, whether physical VTs made sense anymore is debatable, but terminal graphics…

The references to "budget line" were from contemporary sources, and that it was heavily reduced in cost - while terminal sequences were more of "simple matter of programming" ;-) My understanding that some of the features like changing cursor shape were related to the rudimentary custom font feature which was retained from more expensive 3xx line and which accepted IIRC sixel-encoded bitmap fonts.

Funnily enough, the one VT510 I had for some time actually came from a VHS rental place that for reasons unknown to me ran Blockbuster Video customized VAX 6.1 on Alpha (which I also grabbed). BBV was not very well known in Poland, but this specific machine had unwiped disks and logs showing it was used from 1996 to 2000, then it was found lying in a corner when a moving service was asked to clean out a location after a tenant that came in after the video rental.

There was probably a DECserver missing somewhere in the pile before I got my hands on it ;)

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

#280

Post by usrbinbash »

ur-whale wrote: post #245
usrbinbash wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) ?

Yes, of course I can. I have a separate binding in my tmux config to copy to the clipboard.
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