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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

#81

Post by ubercow13 »

topaz0 wrote: post #69

I can't remember the last time I used a non-ascii character in the terminal. I know that's not the case for everyone, and they deserve good terminals too, but it does mean that the criteria measured here have no relevance to my choice of a good terminal for me.

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 insist on printing emojis in their output

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

#82

Post by hnlmorg »

ubercow13 wrote: post #81
topaz0 wrote: post #69

I can't remember the last time I used a non-ascii character in the terminal. I know that's not the case for everyone, and they deserve good terminals too, but it does mean that the criteria measured here have no relevance to my choice of a good terminal for me.

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…

> 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 terminal pretty. But emojis in software feels like juvenile - like signing a formal letter with your gaming handle.

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

#83

Post by cb321 »

lloeki wrote: post #58
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'm not particularly fond of displaying images on the terminal in ways that would resemble a GUI. That said, augmenting a shell-based workflow with tidbits such as this had me sold: https://xcancel.com/thingskatedid/status/1316074032379248640... https://xcancel.com/thingskatedid/status/1316075850580652032... To achieve that, either Sixel or Kitty protocol is fine. IIRC Sixel works over SSH without any fuss, dunno abo…

I can confirm that I just do it over ssh fine all the time -- gnuplot, img2sixel as an "image-cat", etc. (`st` with patches to add sixel support as discussed in various places in these comments.)

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

#84

Post by imiric »

> And then my next windmill that I'm looking at is variable-sized text in the terminal. So when I'm catting a markdown file, I want to see the headings big.

Is this something people actually want?

One of the reasons I enjoy using the terminal is because the text is of a fixed size and monospaced. Even colors and bold text can be distracting at times. I certainly don't want my terminal to render Markdown...

I imagine the feature could be disabled, but still. I'm all for improving terminal UIs, but let's not turn them into a web browser.

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

#85

Post by mort96 »

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!

The only thing I'm missing from ghostty is scrollback search. It's planned AFAIU, I hope it gets there eventually. Otherwise, ghostty has been pretty good.

(I know you can fake scrollback search with tmux. It's not the same.)

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

#86

Post by joouha »

I'd find it very useful to be able to query a terminal to see if it has font support for a given list of characters.

This would allow TUIs to use recent unicode characters which may not be supported (e.g. Symbols for Legacy Computing), or private use characters (e.g. powerline symbols & font-awesome icons), while falling back to a more universally supported character in terminals that do not support them.

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

#87

Post by topaz0 »

ubercow13 wrote: post #81
topaz0 wrote: post #69

I can't remember the last time I used a non-ascii character in the terminal. I know that's not the case for everyone, and they deserve good terminals too, but it does mean that the criteria measured here have no relevance to my choice of a good terminal for me.

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…

It would be different if I worked in chinese or hindi or something, or worked with other people who do. Also worth noting that even terminals that score badly on this benchmark handle most of the things you mention just fine (e.g. accented characters or check marks -- unicode that is well-behaved in terms of mapping a single code point to a single fixed width character). The places where the poorly ranked terminals lose points is mostly in pretty complicated cases that are far from what terminals were originally designed for. Also I have never encountered a command line tool that prints emoji -- and if I did, I would be annoyed.

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

#89

Post by alwillis »

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…?

The theme picker in Ghostty is above and beyond anything I’ve ever seen in a terminal.

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

#90

Post by loph »

The list does not include DECterm.

https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/net/dev/system/pmax_ul3/srvd.74/us...

Maybe it's hard to find these days. However it had the best VT220 emulation I have seen running on X Window System.

I will note that I have not seen a terminal emulator that supports the "double wide" and "double high, double wide" character modes of the VT100. Those giant letters were kinda fun. (#3, #4, and #6 if my memory serves me right.)

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