Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)? There is probably something I am missing not using GPU backed rendering, but I don’t know what I don’t know.
I really love the following things that I can do with kitty:
- Access the scrollback buffer in neovim
- Access the last command output in neovim
- Animated cursor trails. It sounds dumb at first but I find that when sharing my screen, the cursor trails help other people keep track of my cursor when using neovim.
Here are my configs to quickly load @screen_scrollback or @last_cmd_output in neovim
Gotta give a shoutout regarding Ghostty [1]. I keep switching terminal apps; I'm on an iTerm2 kick right now… but I used Ghostty for a while and it's pretty damn cool.
Anecdotally, it feels the fastest to me. Also GPU-accelerated and super configurable. It's amazing how a guy (Mitchell Hashimoto)[2] leaves the company he co-founded before it was sold to IBM.
All I want is terminals to share config across MacOS, Linux and ideally Windows and have great support for SSHing into low end boxes with some minimal persistence solution like tmux on them. In an ideal world I would not have to think about mouse capture and scroll modes, they’d work seamlessly across my device and the devices I’m SSHed into.
It shocked me when I got back into playing with multiple machines after over a decade that this mostly still does not exist.
Instead we’re finally doing gpu rendering (which is amazing but … surprising for this to be the 2025 topic du jour?)
Wezterm runs everywhere, but lets me customise it once and keep that config uniform across all machines.
I can have a single config [0], wrap that in a nix expression [1] for anywhere that runs home-manager / NixOS and then also check it out and symlink on Windows machines as my portal to WSL. As my preferences change, my tooling stays consistent and familiar everywhere it's needed.
I use Ghostty, but the same thing. I have a flake based setup, which means I have the same environment and programs across all my
Macs, Linux machines and WSL terminals.
Takes me about 30 minutes to spin up a new Mac laptop, with 99% of all setup done, down to system preferences.
Linux (nixOS) a little longer because for a brand new machine I may need to do a little hardware specific bootstrapping, but if I’m paving the same machine about the same.
1. quick-select the output in the terminal (select files/paths, urls, etc and either copy or paste them at the cursor). This is very useful as you often don't have the foresight to pipe the command to pipe the output of the command to some selection mechanism and even placing text on the line-editor is not that easy by default.
2. view images (sixel or kitty protocol). This is pretty useful visual analog to cat that doesn't require opening another program and works over ssh. Also for video.
There are some other nice utilities for doing things like downloading files directly in the terminal (it2dl for iterm and kitten transfer for kitty).
kitty doesn't work out of the box on macos if I remember; you have to set configuration for option/command etc.
I tried a few of them and they were all way slower than xfce4-terminal. So I just kept using that.
I don't really dump megabytes of text into the terminal, they might have an edge there? (I found that xterm is much faster than xfce4-terminal for that.)
I have a very silly primary reason for preferring the Kitty terminal - I configured it to look very minimalistic and compact. It doesn't even have the customary app titlebar at the top. The other benefit is that it's actually a lot faster to start up than Terminal.app when you first invoke it. I know iTerm2 is really well-liked, but to me, it gave the "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" vibes.
Kitty and wez both have the ability to present graphics on the terminal which may sound like a solution in search of a problem, but once you start using the capability, it's hard to live without it.
Wez is also cross platform so I get to use it on my Linux and Mac and my (Ugh) Windows work machine. Configuration being done in Lua is also something I quite like, but your mileage may vary on that one.
This is kinda mind-blowing when combined with yazi[0] for example. You can browse a directory with images or videos on your terminal and see previews of both.
All I know is that on MacOS iTerm2 is unmatched. Every few months I go in search of something similar to it (as a backup), and every single time, after trying countless terminals, I give up. The closest I've found is WezTerm, and even that is a pale shadow of Iterm2
I switched from iTerm to WezTerm and haven’t looked back. It feels faster and it’s simpler to configure. I only have a basic use case, though, as tmux does all the heavy work for me. People with an appetite for more features might legitimately prefer iTerm, but I can’t endorse the comment “pale shadow of iTerm” for all use cases.
I just recently decided to replace iterm2 with wezterm when I started moving macbook over to nix. iterm2 is about the only one that didn’t work well for this, since you can’t source control the configuration (import/export doesn’t cut it)
Any of the ones you mentioned would probably work good with nix too. I don’t really care about the config being scriptable at all, it was just the first terminal that easily let me set all of the keyboard shortcuts I wanted, so I stuck with it.
iTerm2 does support source control; I've got my settings in a git repo managed by Chezmoi. In the settings dialog, under "General" -> "Settings", there's an "External settings: Load settings from a custom folder or URL" option.
I've also gone wez from iterm2, and you hit upon why. Don't ever make me click on things. I can't script => modify => export clicking on things. When you make me click on things, you've defined my interface for me, which I did not ask for.
Almost entirely with you on that, actually. But OS and other environment differences frequently demand some sort of tweaking, which I absolutely do not want to do by hand if I've done it before.
It's about time I started using a dotfile manager that I didn't make entirely myself - thanks for the recommendation.
For more and more of the cross-platform headaches, I've actually found myself treating the OS as more of a virtual host, and spending the plurality of my time configuring layers that run in it (modify .zshrc where it can do the work of iterm/wezterm, if it can be done in .emacs then do it there).
I get the feeling that I'm not far off shipping personal nix containers around, but there's still a little too much friction between having containers work and working on the OS itself.
> Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)?
Because these terminals all use the Kitty protocol, you can finally detect a single ESC press without a timeout hack as well as use shift with arrow keys to do text selection.
The fact that it has taken until 2025 to be able to do something this basic is pathetic.
