I don’t want to see the terminal emulator. No chrome. Needs solid emulation. That’s about it. Still using kitty and it’s got a good balance of stuff I use. I don’t really get the point of ghostty. These things are a bit like browsers, they just display the content and are interchangeable. People get super weird about terminal emulators and window managers.

GPU Acceleration and a scroll bar I can drag.
I swear every terminal I’ve tried has one or the other but never both at once for some reason…

Hear me out: I want the prompt at the top of the screen.

It’s terribly inconvenient to have the place you’re typping your command into at the bottom. On laptops, your fingers are in the way, and on desktops, you’re always craning your neck looking at the bottom-left.

Imagine instead if your terminal looked like this:

| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| $ curl https://...
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| $ echo "hello"
| hello
| $ ls
| output.png
| goes.txt
| here.webm
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

After a command is entered in the upper pane, it’s appended to the lower pane along with the output just like a normal terminal. Maybe even something like translating Shift+Enter to mean “clear the output pane and run”.

Unified system for popping tabs in and out as windows like a browser (mixed support).

Session handler for tying tabs into screen or tmux (you can do this by yourself, but it’s only useful sometimes).

I don’t want all these fancy schmancy features. I’m very happy with foot in its current form. The only additional feature I would like is ligature support, but otherwise foot already has the features I want in a terminal emulator, and more that are optional for me (e.g. sixel support; although I do use sixels for my lf previewer, it is not necessary for me). I also don’t want my terminal emulator to have tiling, because rivertile does that for me, or whatever your window tiler is. Same for tabs. You can use i3 tabs, sway tabs, Hyprland groups, etc instead of having tabs in your terminal emulator.

I dunno, they pretty much all work the same for me.

I know it’s difficult, but I’d like for a terminal to have copy-paste work correctly, even over SSH. Most of my shell config fiddling has been trying to get copy-paste working through tmux+emacs+ssh in a way that doesn’t require xsel.

Other than that, one thing I’m missing from Alacritty is tabs. I know I can/should use tmux, but oftentimes I’ve launched a long-running command and then realized I want to do something else in another terminal.

A jupyter-notebook like approach, in which commands and history are kept in previous boxes and show outputs in limited boxes and we stop limiting ourselves to pretending we’re still using teletypes but maintain the power pipes bring to unix. Also, all boxes are given filenames in a virtual fs that makes it easy to reference them or their output and treat them like a file, erasing the need to rerun a command to run something on its output because you forgot to save it.

The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can’t believe there are no modern terminals with it.

Seconded on both counts.

AI cryptocurrency miner

A shell where I can just copy and paste like a normal damn text editor (or using readline bindings).

How is me doing Ctrl+[ in tmux and then arrow keys to get to the line I want to copy, and then Ctrl+Space and then Alt-w, and then q my best bet at this?

I usually just reach for the mouse and do Ctrl+Shift+C instead, but goddamn do I wish I didn’t have to.

Also, what the fuck tmux - how is rolling the mouse bound to anything that anyone would want? And why do you inherit the shell you spawned from? Why not spawn as a new shell like everyone expects you to. Asshole utility.

i wish i didn’t need a terminal emulator

in the meantime, emacs is a decent replacement

1. Distrobox, podman container support (listing, entering shell, color)
2. Never open new windows
3. Not GTK
4. Normal name
5. Not shady or proprietary

Otherwise Konsole, Cosmic-Term or “ptyxis” are both fine

Good touch support. Using termux has more then sold me on it, While many terms to support touch, I do often come across some that don’t. Otherwise i’m a simple man, be fast enough, work with one of the “major” image specs like sixel or whatever and do the basics and im set.

Mitchell Hashimoto achieved a 1.0 release?!?

There’s a clear basis for calling his company MushyCore at my shop. Everything is squishy in the middle!