It's also quite amazing how macOS doesn't support containerization which is hugely important for a hefty chunk of all devs out there. So, Docker Desktop, Colima, OrbStack. VMs. Deal with it.
Not to mention the amazing amount of services running in the background, at least 80% of which I haven't needed in the 6.5 years I have my Mac, but can't stop / remove / disable.
My Linux laptop is supposedly 40% weaker than my desktop Mac, so the online sheets say at least. It runs my work's integration test suite 15% faster.
A lot of us have given Macs a very honest chance. It's okay and it's very workable, that much is a fact -- but if one is willing to pimp their machine and OS -- nowadays made even easier by LLMs -- then the experience and everyday ergonomics and actual dev-enhancing abilities quickly outpace a Mac.
And I wish that wasn't true because I wasn't looking forward to changing my main machine. But the annoyances and slowness and closeness just compound until they start literally reducing your everyday productivity.
I’m running Docker Desktop as I write this. What did you mean by “doesn’t support containerization”?
And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time? Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar.
Does not support it _natively_ and is measurably slower than a supposedly much weaker Linux machine was my point, which I believe I expressed quite clearly.
> And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time?
Normally I don't. I have an okay idea on how modern OS-es work; temporary swaps, compressing RAM for rarely used background processes etc. -- they work amazing, macOS included.
I suppose my problem is more the services that _do_ interfere, like the one that feels it has to scan every CLI command I launch, to the point that it became noticeable, especially side by side with the "weaker" Linux laptop and hell, even with a VM-ed Linux inside my gaming PC as well.
So OK, I accept the correction: does not much matter how many are they in general. Those that interfere though, and I can't stop them -- this is where I drew the line and gradually started my migration away from macOS.
And this:
> Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar
...is objectively false. I just tried it; even my home server that's doing plenty of stuff I get 244 items. On the Mac I am writing this? 840.
Maybe the laptop with KDE will have a touch more than 244, but I doubt they'd be 840.
Call me a purist, I like to know what my background services are doing, though I'll admit I care less and less with age.
I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I genuinely don’t know what you mean here. Macs have built-in virtualization and containerization. Docker and podman etc are wrappers around it, but the internals are built in.
Did you mean they have to emulate x86 code if you download an x86 image instead of a native one?
I mostly meant they don't support cgroups and other Docker-required machinery and have to emulate them.
OrbStack bridges a good chunk of the Linux performance gap however. I was using Colima before and then the Linux laptop was running the integration test suite ~60% faster. OrbStack reduced that to 15%.
Yeah, apparently a certain group on HN will forever repeat this.
As another poster said, no checks in the world will help if programmers ignored them. It's a one-liner lint in Rust. Somebody at Cloudflare figured it's too inconvenient to do.
> suddenly we are in the situation that every single bit of code out there is supposed to put memory safety as a chief concern
I don't know why you are clumping together fanatics with the pragmatic folk who finally pioneered, in practice, the idea that memory safety is objectively valuable. Different groups.
> Empirical evidence that static typing makes some real difference in terms of bugs or safety is inconclusive at best
Literally 99.9999% of everything out there is inconclusive. You'll only extremely rarely find something that is objectively 100% true. So this is a disingenuous argument on your part, seemingly used to undermine something that you might not like. As such, it's an unfair discussion technique.
I worked nearly 9 years with Java a lifetime ago. I could not ever see any actual evidence that OOP and global mutability have ever improved any project.
See? This can go both ways.
> This industry pretends to be driven by technical considerations, yet, with some exceptions, is mostly driven by fads, folk knowledge and aesthetic choices.
Always has been, and it goes for almost all industries except those that are heavily regulated.
Believe me, I wish I had documented it. I didn't realize that this would be surprising or controversial until I described the experience later to others. Some people basically didn't believe me.
The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.
I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.
If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.
Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like.
WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature. It also renders my prompt perfectly; no small pixel divergences like all other terminals have.
Kitty I don't remember why I rejected.
Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux. So much more key presses to achieve basic functionality, it boggles my mind why people love it. But, to each their own obviously.
It's also likely I'll settle for some Linux-exclusive terminal but as I'm not yet possessing a Linux workstation (just a laptop) I haven't put the requisite time to do this research.
Maybe worth another look at then? I'm far from a Kitty power user, but it does pretty much everything else I want it to, including working as a quake-style terminal[0]. And you can extend it with kittens[1] if you so desire. Also, the next release should presumably include smooth scrolling[2] which I'm quite looking forward to.
Maybe more than any one feature though, I appreciate the hard work that Kovid (the creator of Kitty) has done to tastefully add new VT standards and try to make terminals as useful as they can be in the 21st century.
Kitty is the best one. It has several features which have proven so useful I wasn't able to stay on anything else for more than a couple of hours (including the one this topic is about).
Ctrl+Shift+G wraps the output of the previous command into a pager (say, less). You often only know you needed a pager after that output is printed.
Ctrl+Shift+E highlights all links on the current screen and assigns short alphanumeric codes to them, so you can open links without using the mouse. For example, `Ctrl+Shift+E 1` opens the first link, `.. 2` the second one, etc.
Ctrl+Shift+U opens symbol search where you can find & insert symbols using their unicode names. Emoji, TUI blocks, rare accented characters you need once in a blue moon, CJK ideographs, whatever.
These small quality-of-life features make a big difference. In my terminal (TerminalNexus, Windows) I added per-tab session colors - click a palette icon, pick a color, and the terminal background and tab header change for that session. Simple but it's saved me from running commands in the wrong environment more than once.
Kitty is great, but its author has very strong opinions, strongly held; this keeps a number of popular requests summarily rejected. In particular, there is no way to color plain bold text, which is possible in basically any other emulator. This is a deal-breaker for me personally, it makes reading e.g. man pages unnecessarily hard.
I'm not the GP, but I do remember why I rejected Kitty when I tried several terminal emulators last years: it broke quite a few of my workflows.
For instance, in vim the F3 key was broken[^1]. It was very surprising and weird, and a portable workaround required some arcane vim configuration.
Another important pain point was that the font rendering was different in Kitty to any other app, and very dependent on the screen DPI. IIRC, for a DPI around 100, I had to switch to "legacy rendering" because the default rendering was barely readable.
I also remember issues with SSH. And Kitty crashed at least once. And I wasn't a fan of Kitty's mix of C and Python. After a week or two of usage, my Kitty config file was big, with an extra hundred lines of Python for the tabbar. Despite some nice features (like the shortcut to put the output of the last command into a file), I got uneasy with all this mess. I tried Ghostty, which was as good as Kitty with much less oddities.
I wouldn't say I love tmux, but I have a configuration file that I put on every computer I use regularly that is very comfortable for me. I basically live in the terminal across many different machines, and having the same interface for managing panes and tabs even when using ssh is invaluable.
I also use vim (well neovim) as my primary editor, and have set up tmux to integrate well with it, so that might contribute to my appreciation and continued usage of it.
If you spend any amount of time on remote machines with unreliable connections, local tmux is insta-reject because tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient. As with GP, it's also why I don't consider terminal emulators without tabs at all.
I hold Control and double-tap b for managing the remote session, then everything else is the same.
Granted, I'm not a power user, so there may be numbers that get frustrating. I could imagine complex splits getting confusing (I don't use splits at all).
C-b is less ergonomic than C-a that is the default on GNU screen. The first thing in tmux is to remap to C-a. (Triply so if you remap caps lock to ctrl.)
I switched to zellij, but I made more like my tmux was because I didn't want to learn new binding; C-q activates tmux mode. C-q + g locks so I can pass through comamnds to inner zellij. C-g unlocks. on super+enter for it opens a ghostty it and atached it to zellij session named $(hostname).
On reboot it remembers my tabs and panels and even commands that ran inside last (i.e there is popup in every panel that had something runing to run it again or just open a terminal)
Before my great wayland migration I ran patched st and it was great. Terminal job is render what terminal multi-plexer gives it and passes input to multiplexer.
I went with C-a for quite a long time, but then I discovered that C-a is a keymap for jumping the cursor to the beginning and f the line, so I remapped tmux prefix to C-Space.
Yep, I've been using tmux for almost 10 years. Its config has followed me across every terminal I've used in Windows with WSL 2, macOS (work laptop) and native Linux. It's a nice abstraction over getting split panes, windows (tabs), sessions, search, scroll back, consistent key binds and the overall theme to work the same across environments.
What proper window manager shows tab group list at the top of the current app window and allows shortcuts/mouse to reorder the list and also allows moving a tab outside of this list to another tab group?
Sway and i3. But when a WM does it, you can mix different apps in the same tab group, and your tab key binds can be the same as your WM key binds. You don’t have to remember alt+h for tabs, win+h for windows, etc.
But I’m just busting your chops, don’t listen to me. I don’t even use i3/Sway, or use tabs at all. Everyone has their own workflow that works best for them.
Scrollback does exist on Ghostty! But you need to switch to “tip”. This can be done in the config file.
The tip build is very stable and has many bugs fixed (like various memory leaks).
there's scrollback search in the nightly build if that's an option for you (I've been using it a ton for a few months and haven't seen any bugs so far):
I haven't seen anyone else mention Terminology yet. It uses an unconventional GUI framework (Enlightenment / EFL), but that aside, it's fast and has more or less all of the features you'd expect of a terminal:
Back in 2018 I thought it felt kind of sluggish and consumed quite a bit of resources, but looked pretty. Have they improved on performance since then?
Are you sure you're thinking of the same terminal? Its standout feature has been performance. Granted, that was 10+ years ago, but I've never noticed it regressing.
You can search scroll back on Ghostty nightly. I switched straight from iTerm2 (after 20 years of iTerm), but _do_ remember the reason I rejected Kitty: it has a ton of Python in it, which is usually indicative of software which is going to be a pain in the ass.
I like tmux because it does more than tabs in an emulator. I can detach from a session on a remote host to leave a process running after I disconnect, or to pick the session back up on another PC.
I do use tabs rather than repeatedly switching tmux sessions, but I do end up running tmux for splitting the GUI into side by side layouts.
Detaching is working just fine with `screen` as well.
I like the idea of tmux but as another poster suggested, I prefer to just get better at my
window manager to achieve similar results. tmux requires way too many key presses for me.
> Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux.
Surprised none of the other commenters have mentioned zellij. I work across windows (WSL) and linux so really like having the same set up for both, which means no Ghostty/Kitty since they don't support windows.
Zellij is a lot smoother and nicer looking out the box, and its key shortcuts are pretty intuitive. There's a lit of advantages to not having an extra layer, but zellij + alacritty is definitely worth having in your list of options!
Very glad for that--it's what made me stop my evaluation the first time around. I looked for the feature in issues and just saw #9821 about memory use of the buffer which could be an issue if configuring very large scrollback as I do.
BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?
I built a Windows terminal emulator (TerminalNexus) and scrollback search was one of the first things I prioritized. Ctrl+F opens a search dialog with regex and case sensitivity, and the buffer size is configurable per shell profile. No tmux needed.
Personally kitty is the only one I keep coming back too. Mostly because it's very customisable, fast, lean, ligatures, separate font for italics, great macro support, and supports automatic tiling panes.
> Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux. So much more key presses to achieve basic functionality, it boggles my mind why people love it. But, to each their own obviously.
Tabs usually mean mouse+click to switch which takes way more effort that a simple alt+number or similar keybinding used to switch "tabs" in tmux. I'd guess that some terminal emulator tabs allow keybindings to switch tabs as well but, modelling OP, I'm focusing on the expected default experience.
No, zero mouse usage, you can both address each tab by number and just moving between them. I wouldn't have any terminal emulator without the latter feature at least, and all I've tried support it.
Been a long time since I last tried tmux but was not switching between panes something like Ctrl-B + Ctrl-<something_else>? I don't remember but if it was that it's still much more than Super-Left/Right.
You can turn on a feature documented as allowing the terminal to be controlled by escape sequences, but then output of programs can control the terminal! Whoop-de-do.
That's a nice way to handwave drive-by unproductive "rust btw" commnents.
Sure there's comments on all spectrums. But rust commenters are on an extreme end of it when it comes to making sure the world knows how other languages are inferior and often their users too.
Thanks for yet another example if toxic behaviour by that community. So now arguing is also "parroting".
If you were discussing in good faith, instead of belitling arguments as "parroting" you'd use something like algolia to find the answer for yourself. And you could have an easy start by finding comments from the links on this post alone. Let alone 10 in the entire HN in the last month. But that is of little interest I see.
Funnily I already see some on the first page, incredible:
You see what you want to see and I refuse to be dragged into a mud-slinging contest. Please reconsider your tone for the future. Start off better and we can chat.
I started periodically asking the same question and I get 20-25 upvotes and then eat 15 downvotes some hours later. One recent example (if ~75 days is recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291249).
It is a very weird case of aggressors pretending to be victims.
Did I see zealous Rust comments? Sure! 4-5 on HN in the last 5 years maximum. On Reddit it could be 10-15 for the same period but the discourse there is not very civil or informative anyway so I started ignoring them and not thinking them representative.
On HN I see regular Rust hate while claiming that zealots are everywhere... and like you, I just can't see it.
It can be a recurring grant if a target OSS project continues to be highly valuable, but risky. When it loses value or is derisked (e.g. by extra funding), then grant priority will naturally move to another project.
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