1. Better integration with shell e.g. visual cues when something gone right/wrong, show when you have elevated priveleges.
2. Word highlight with different colors and some presets

I like kitty already.

Something to please consider is support for IME, so that you can input languages like Japanese and Chinese properly.

Honestly i prefer my console window to look a bit more “simple” - no background image, smooth animations, or anything like that.

The reason is that i prefer simplicity, clarity and efficiency over “beauty”, animation, and smoothness, as the console window is a tool for work for me, not an art project.

Features that make sense to me, however, are :

• being able to save the terminal output to a file, similar to tee, but after having typed the command.
• larger “hidden” output buffer (more than the default 64K) - it doesn’t show on screen, but can be redirected into a file later on
• possibly also integration into other programs, for example being able to simply include a bash console into a dev environment.

also a feature like “format this output” would be nice - for example, cat doc.md and then “menu -> format as markdown” and it opens a new window where the markdown text is pretty-formatted.

I use iTerm’s tmux integration all the time and would find it incredibly difficult to switch to another terminal emulator that doesn’t have it.

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

I don’t like smooth scrolling in any software. It adds extra delay until the animation is complete and you can see the result.

I’m more-amenable to instantly drawing something at the new point, but having “trails” added to help cue the eye as to movement. For example, I’ve never figured out why someone hasn’t done a mouse pointer trails app that uses splines – that doesn’t entail adding any delay, and mouse polling speed is often higher than monitor refresh rate, so you could get more control points.

I use foot, as it’s Wayland-native and also performant.

It doesn’t have one feature that I’d like:

• A configurable set of characters to use as expansion of the selection when double-clicking. Urxvt can do this, which lets one add “:”, which lets one copy an URL by double-clicking on it.

I also use tmux. Most people probably don’t think of it as a virtual terminal program, but it has to have its own virtual terminal. It could use:

• Sixel support, which lets bitmaps be displayed in terminals. This is uncommon and IME unstable in some terminal emulators that support it. It is not in mainline tmux.

• Better performance. GNU screen is still faster than tmux.

I occasionally use cool-retro-term for fun, which emulates the look of vintage terminals. It can’t do a couple of emulation modes that I think would be fun:

• A line printer printing on paper.

• Low baud rate simulation, so that things like slow scrolling of BBS ANSI art can be replicated. There are a few programs to try to do this at another level, but they’re a pain.

• Support for some emulator-style shader library, like librashader. People have written good shader implementations for emulators to simulate CRTs in sophisticated ways.

• IIRC it can’t do configurable-time phosphor decay.

I want it to render things quickly and to support light & dark themes.

Both konsole and alacrity have failed me there.

If it has any window chrome, I want it to look good.

Ghostty … actually does everything I want pretty well, modulo some rendering glitches I attribute to GTK and fractional scaling.

Edit: I do like smooth scrolling, but I can live without it. I’ve used emacs for so long … I’m just used to not having it for walls of text, even though I think slight smooth scrolling majorly improves readability of motion.

I’ve only ever used the default provided by my DE, which at the time of writing happens to be Black Box