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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

#91

Post by dgl »

loph wrote: post #90

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…

xterm does and some others, I posted about this and emojis a while ago: https://dgl.cx/2025/06/can-your-terminal-do-emojis

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

#92

Post by chrysoprace »

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've always wanted to like Alacritty but they've had an open issue to support ligatures since 2017 and they're not in a rush to implement them.

Now the only feature I need in Ghostty is Windows support.

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

#93

Post by alwillis »

jeffbee wrote: post #52

It's interesting that these are rankings, but in some cases the individual points are make or break for a given use case. For example, none of the emulators ranked higher than iTerm2 support Tek 4010 mode, which iTerm2 does support. So that's the one I keep using.

It would amazing if iTerm used the Ghostty library (libghostty) for the core terminal functionality; then the developer could focus on UI/UX. iTerm has tons of useful features, but a lot of them are buried in the UI.

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

#94

Post by nusaru »

mort96 wrote: post #85
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.)

Relevant GitHub issue: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

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

#96

Post by alwillis »

dmd wrote: post #59
Asooka wrote: post #13

I wonder how long until terminals support half of the XWindows protocol (as some weird combination of Markdown, HTML and escape codes, most probably). This is not a diss, I would actually be pretty happy with a pared-down GUI protocol in the terminal with extensive Unicode support.

well iTerm2 now has a #&*%( web browser built in...

Yes! Hoping I can get Neomutt to render HTML email without resorting to launching a browser.

Since URLs are clickable in iTerm, you have the option to view a webpage in the terminal.

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

#98

Post by toast0 »

doug_durham wrote: post #88
bartvk wrote: post #11

The terminal that comes with macOS version ends on the 29th place in the results.

Yeah, I don't understand. I spend my day in the macOS terminal app and the thought "Hey I'd like a better terminal" has never occurred to me.

Maybe it's better now, but when I started my time on OSX, the built in terminal defaulted to "unlimited" scrollback, so if you were used to tailing giant log files, it would beachball pretty quick. I spent the rest of my time using iterm2 instead; it defaulted to a sensible scrollback length; and at some point it added a progress bar when you made a giant paste.

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

#99

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

chrysoprace wrote: post #92
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've always wanted to like Alacritty but they've had an open issue to support ligatures since 2017 and they're not in a rush to implement them. Now the only feature I need in Ghostty is Windows support.

> 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?)

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

#100

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

nusaru wrote: post #94
mort96 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Relevant GitHub issue: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

> To be completely clear, it’s not on the “IMMEDIATE” roadmap (as noted in the prior comment). It’s absolutely on the roadmap and I even already started some it in a branch. But as a passion project, we prioritize working on whatever we want and this isn’t currently the priority. It’s high on the list but not like.. next release (“immediate”) priority at the time of this comment.

I mean I can respect that, personally it isn't as a big of deal with me so I use ghostty on my mac but I would still think that I would advocate ghostty only after disclosing this to anyone to be really honest.

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