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Comment by yuryk | Hacker News Reader

Best terminal for MacOS.

I really wanted WezTerm to be the best terminal on macOS. However, when I tried switching from Kitty to WezTerm a month or so ago I found WezTerm’s latency was noticeably higher than Kitty and WezTerm often painted lines as blank in vim when they actually had content. So I was forced to go back to Kitty on macOS.

On Linux, it’s no contest, I love WezTerm over Kitty on Linux and didn’t have any of these issues.

Downloaded the latest stable for macOS and still has the same problem as before - if you have long list of items you want to scroll through or if you try ot simple move cursor with an arrow (hjkl) - you get some weird lags. Neither kitty nor Alacritty has this.

What does this have to offer compared to Alacritty?

Ligatures is one. I also find the copy mode and the hyperlinks feature [1] handy.

[1]: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/hyperlinks.html

Main thing was support for ligatures which Alacritty does not support: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

As someone who doesn't use tmux, two features pushed me to this over Alacritty: native scrollback with a scrollbar, and native tabs.

Lower OpenGL / GLES version number requirements, so wezterm can run on Arm64 hardware with no hassle.

Tabs, splits, programmability, best-in-class graphics support, an ssh multiplexor, session management, Lua scripting.

Alacritty and Wezterm have very different--if not opposite--philosophies. Choose Alacritty if you want something simple, fast, focused, done right. Choose WezTerm for flexibility and being a cross-platform environment by itself.

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