I’ll start: After switching to Neovide from the terminal for Neovim, I got really hooked on the animated cursor and smooth scrolling (links to Neovide’s features page). It wasn’t until 2 months ago when the earlier was added to Kitty. I did so much overthinking about which terminal to use, and realized that I wouldn’t (and don’t) use most of the features provided by ones like iTerm and Kitty, though I picked the later. I was pleasantly surprised to see it added, even if it could use more work to make long smooth cursor animations like Neovide. The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can’t believe there are no modern terminals with it.

(Somewhat) Side note: At this point many users realized that Ghostty got over-hyped, here is Mitchell Hashimoto’s (dev of Ghostty) thoughts:

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 – Mitchell Hashimoto

I didn’t anticipate the hype. Some people think I am lying when I say this. I’m not. I’m not so naive to think that private betas and exclusive access don’t generate hype in principle. But I didn’t think many people at all would be interested in a terminal emulator. I thought I was building boring software for a niche audience. No hype! But I was wrong, and the consequences were real. People were frustrated that they couldn’t get in. People felt left out. People felt like I was being fake to generate hype. The waitlist grew larger than I was comfortable allowing in (given my prior stated priorities). I’m sorry about that. All I can say is that I didn’t intend for this to happen. I ramped up beta invites to try to get as many people in as I felt comfortable with (well, a bit beyond that). We ended the beta at around 5,000 users in a Discord of 28,000 at the time. Not quite the percentage of access I wanted for people but more than I could handle.
…

One more negative aspect of the hype is the expectation of Ghostty being revolutionary. It is and it isn’t. Ghostty has different goals and tradeoffs than other terminals. For those looking for those properties, Ghostty is a breath of fresh air and does things that no other terminal does. But for others, it’s just a terminal. And that’s okay. I hope you find a terminal that works for you and I don’t claim that Ghostty is the end all be all of terminals.

  • davel [he/him]English
    5•9 days ago

    None. As far as I’m concerned, terminal emulators reached feature completion twenty years ago. I just use whatever default emulator comes with an operating systems without giving it a second thought, because they all do the job just fine these days.

  • @donio
    3•8 days ago
    1. The basics: high quality terminal emulation with utf-8 and directcolor support
    2. Customization is by simple git friendly text config. Build time config (ala st) is acceptable if done in a reasonable way.
    3. A way to pipe panes into external commands to allow for customized url and other other data extraction. Built-in regexs are not always enough and doing it on the tmux side is not always ideal.
    4. Control over key bindings and mouse behavior
    5. Small, very fast, instantaneous startup
    6. Very predictable behavior, no surprises
    7. Minimal dependencies (including build time) are a plus. Definitely no 100MB+ electron beasts.
    8. Support X11 since I am sticking with that for now
    9. A codebase I can understand in case I need to change it. Simple and fast build. For core tools like terminal emulators I must be able to build or modify them without much trouble.
    10. Not too much extra junk. I don’t use menus, tabs, scrollbars etc so I don’t want the terminal to be huge or slow to support every feature others might want. I will put up with some extras if they can be completely disabled and don’t significantly affect performance or startup time or code complexity.
    11. Absolutely no network service integration, no matter how well intended. The only acceptable network activity is talking to the X11 socket.
    12. Longevity. I like to use my tools for years and years. I am interested in new tech of course but I don’t hop from one hype train to the next.

    I know this is not everyone’s cup of tea but you asked what I want. And nowadays it’s at least as much about do not wants as wants.

    I briefly tried ghostty when it was going around earlier. Slow startup time (~250ms if I remember right), the gtk-4 dependency and some weird defaults like the client side decoration (which I gather can be turned off in config) made me pass on it for now but might take another look in a few months. It didn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me either but there are plenty of much worse options out there too.