Just drop the name. Explain what you like about it if you are feeling generous. I am curious what the terminal emulator landscape is these days.
ghostty, it supports the kitty graphics protocol, it’s pretty fast and easily configurable and pretty. i’d use allacrity but they don’t support kitty protocol.
Ghostty does look like a good alacritty alternative which supports a more modern feature set.
I just noticed ratty is a new terminal that could also be a good alternative. It even supports 3D models.
i wouldn’t recommend ratty. or at least not for now, afaik it was created as an experiment to add 3d rendering in the terminal, but it still needs some work, plus no one is actually doing much 3d rendering there. which outweights the benefits of a stable working terminal for something that (still) has no purpose in everyday usage.
It does look like a silly, experimental terminal. I just thought it was interesting, but it does need more development. I’m interested in a minimal but modern terminal with features such as kitty graphics support. I prefer to choose tools with minimal overlap of features, such as terminals without built-in multiplexers, which is why I have used alacritty with tmux and zellij. Ratty would be a good fit for me when it becomes more stable.
i think that fits ghostty pretty well. it does have some extra stuff backed in such as tabs but you can disable them and let a multiplexer handle that (that’s what i did) and also remove other stuff such a window decoration and so on. allacrity is fast but no kitty support and kitty obviously has kitty support but it’s slower (it’s python) so ghostty is a pretty good middle ground. it’s written in zig which sits more or less at the same level of abstraction as rust.
this is my ghostty config if you’re interested:
# appearance theme = tokyonight_night window-padding-x = 5 window-padding-y = 8 window-height = 30 window-width = 90 background-image = background.png background-image-opacity = 0.1 background-image-position = center background-image-fit = contain # background-image-repeat = true # font font-family = FiraCode Nerd Font font-size = 11 # cursor cursor-style = bar cursor-style-blink = true gtk-titlebar = false # misc scrollback-limit = 10000 copy-on-select = true command = zellij
ooooh, pretty!
technically the truth: Termux
Whatever default comes with the distro; all it has to do is run bash.
been using ghostty for a few months… works pretty well except with Hermes which likes to completely fuck up how it handles anything that requires you to press the shift button from time to time.
What’s hermes?
It’s possible it is a problem with hermes rather than the teminal. When I used opencode in the past it destroyed the terminal somehow with two different emulators. I am using codex right now and it doesn’t have that problem.
yeah it is a problem with Hermes. they fix and break it over and over again all the time
foot
Foot is what I am using at the moment too because it came already set up on the distro I am on (Zirconium OS) but I am thinking of switching to something more sophisticated because I miss the feature of tabs in ghostty which is what I was using before Zirconium.
Tabs are bourgeois.
I mostly stick to foot for just how simple it is. I try not to do much config on my system and foot + sway is a combo that just sort of works all the time.
+1 for foot+sway 🤌
Tried it out on a fedora atomic OS and never went back.
For tabs you could use tmux, its a program that runs on any terminal and it let you use tabs and split screen
xfce4-terminal
st - simple terminal
last time i checked, kitty was the final boss of terminal emulators so i setup that one because at that time alacritty, which is what i was using at that point, didn’t have image support.
There are nowadays a few emulators that implement modern features like kitty’s image protocol. Off the top of my head I know of kitty, ghostty, wezterm and rio term. But I don’t know the difference between them.
Konsole, because yakuake (pull down quake-style terminal ) is the best, and I want a single terminal config.
Alacritty. It was prettier than konsole, and it just so happened to come installed on my cachyos install. Just changed the background color to black.
I use Konsole because Alacritty came with transparency by default on CachyOS. I found it impossible to read, so I took the laziest option and switched to Konsole because it was already installed.
The feature set in Konsole is pretty underrated. It’s my emulator of choice on the steam deck because it allows you to send signals from a drop down menu which is indispensable on hardware without physical keybaords.
Alacritty, though at some point I may want to move to foot and take advantage of using it as a server/daemon as it would work well with my sway desktop. Alacritty beats foot on rendering time because of its GPU acceleration, though foot is faster where its VT parser shines. Konsole is pretty great, though. The one feature I miss from Konsole is the unlimited scrollback being stored as a cache file on disk. I wish more terminals supported this feature.
If you want tabs, why not try a terminal multiplexer like tmux or zellij?
Here are some useful resources for comparing terminals:
I’ve also been interested in KMSCON, which is a terminal emulator able to run in the Linux userspace without a graphics server. It looks like it has been getting more support and development this year, and I hope it becomes successful.
I have used tmux in the past but mainly for persistent sessions rather than the multiplexing. I should give that or zellij a try.
I’ve used Tabby for a while because I like tabs and it can save ssh connections as profiles to start upon opening a new tab. After I tried Manjaro on one device I also generally switched to zsh with a bunch of plugins because it looks nice.
i use contour. reason being, i’m a vim user. i want my terminal to be modal too.
Being able to select and copy without using the keyboard sounds like the dream
