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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

#41

Post by alkh »

hnlmorg wrote: post #39
alkh wrote: post #36

I have been pretty happy with Alacritty for a while but just tried Ghostty and am a little bit mind-blown. The fact that it has a built-in theme picker is insanely convenient for people working on multiple computers at the same time(so the same theme might not work everywhere). Overall, it literally looks like a better Alacritty alternative. The creator(s) did a great job!

I thought built in theme pickers were the norm…?

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

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

#42

Post by pneumic »

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.

Wezterm is actually programmable. I am looking to drop Kitty as it intentionally offers minimal tmux support and the text rendering options that made it superior for me are being deprecated.

Until Ghostty offers the scriptability found in wezterm and kitty (e.g., hit a keybind, spawn a new terminal and execute a font picker script), I am trying out wezterm, which is pretty great, but renders fonts too thin by default. I stare at this thing eight hours a day so text rendering is super important.

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

#43

Post by gschizas »

zadjii wrote: post #40

No love for Windows Terminal? I know that linux has a much richer terminal ecosystem, but WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now. Could anyone have imagined that 10 years ago?

In the test, Windows Terminal (weirdly written as "terminal.exe") comes up as #4 in the scoring table.

As to the "love" question, I still watch this video from time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE :)

EDIT: I love the easter egg with the names of the developers across the Windows timeline :)

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

#44

Post by trenchpilgrim »

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…

Viewing an image in a terminal can be really handy for debugging ML systems that use images or bitmaps. You can also paste images directly into claude code as context.

Once while working on a daemon that did both ML and DSP on live audio I added the ability to play sounds and display spectrographs of in-memory audio data at various points of the internal pipeline to debug an issue that would have been difficult otherwise. Way quicker than dumping WAV files to view externally.

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

#45

Post by wrs »

xp84 wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 have to say, (caveat, I have not tried any of these yet) that I am intrigued by all these features like graphics being added to terminals. It feel like exploring an alternate timeline 1990s where the GUI “lost” — of course in the absence of a successful Windows and Macintosh, terminals would have naturally gained these graphical abilities 30 years ago.

That alternate timeline started in 1982 with the Blit terminal. [0] It was a GUI made of overlapping terminals that had a serial graphics protocol.

[0] https://www.osnews.com/story/26315/blit-a-multitasking-windo...

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

#46

Post by hnlmorg »

alkh wrote: post #41
hnlmorg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought built in theme pickers were the norm…?

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.

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

#47

Post by trenchpilgrim »

9dev wrote: post #37
IshKebab wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is though - the ssh authentication and connection is already handled, and I'm already in a terminal. When I quit the app or session I'm back in the terminal. If it worked it would greatly reduce the hassle. Think about all the TUI apps that exist. They're useful because they're convenient when working in a terminal, not because they look like shit.

What you are looking for is forwarding an X session via SSH, and that has been supported since the dawn of time.

Is there a wayland equivalent?

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

#48

Post by setopt »

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…

It’s pretty nice to ssh into a remote host and plot some data there without needing either X forwarding, or dumping to files and rsync’ing, or similar workarounds.

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

#49

Post by alberth »

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.

mitchellh says no plan to support Sixel:

https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/1985432954089455856#m

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

#50

Post by zadjii »

mechanicum wrote: post #21
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

FWIW The definitive thread on "images in terminals" is probably found in these threads:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...

there's lengthy discussion from just about everyone at this point in those threads, about why images in terminals is Hard

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