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Comment by mk12 | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of terminal projects recently. Ghostty (https://mitchellh.com/ghostty) and Terminal Click (https://terminal.click) come to mind. Also Warp and Fig but they don't appeal to me because they're proprietary (and Fig got acquired by Amazon). I've been very happy with kitty (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) for years and it would take a lot to make me switch.

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I switched to wezterm (https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/) a few months ago and I'm pretty pleased with it (especially the search function, which is something not many terminals support), although it still has some rough edges.

+1 for WezTerm.

Switched from iTerm 2 like a year ago.

Huge WezTerm fan, the dev is very friendly and responsive on GitHub as well.

I love Wez, but I hate the lack of macOS native tabs.

I've used kitty for quite a while but it has subtle problems with tmux that I use all the time (one of the primary reason is persistent session).

From the FAQ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/ and other GitHub issues, it seems the recommendation is not to use tmux. Since I need to use tmux, I then change the terminal emulator I use instead.

What kinds of problems? I've used tmux with kitty plenty and never noticed anything, but that's probably because I just didn't care to look.

The one I encountered is color problem. I can never get xterm-256color works reliably and has to use screen-256color which supports lesser features such as italic.

Running btop within tmux using kitty also has color problems, but Alacritty also fails at that.

Colors in terminals are tough. There's the terminal, then the shell, then tmux, then vim, and you want all of their configs in concert even when you're switching between light and dark one or twice a day. Colors are tough in general. Even the browser color story kind of sucks. Dark reader goes a long way, but not enough

Right, I sort of understand that (not the details). I'm sympathetic to the kitty author, who explains why other terminals and tmux are doing things wrong, etc.

I guess it is especially messy in the terminal, reading a little bit into the issues and it just feels like a ton of legacy hacks between different implementations.

And comparing that to the browser is interesting. Both are "ubiquitous"—terminal emulator for cli/TUI, and browser for GUI. May be because of there generality / ubiquity, it is messy and impossible to "make it right".

I had a long battle with making kitty work with tmux. I settled on the following in ~/.tmux.conf, before moving to wezterm for good. Maybe it fixes things for you, too:

    set -g default-terminal xterm-256color
    set-option -sa terminal-overrides ',xterm-kitty:RGB'
    set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",xterm*:Tc:smcup@:rmcup@"
    set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",screen*:Tc:smcup@:rmcup@"
    set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",tmux*:Tc:smcup@:rmcup@"

I honestly don't know whether all are needed, or only some. But with these, it worked well for me.

I tried the first line and in some situations (specifically with some remotes, i.e. kitty -> ssh -> tmux with that 1st line) it still won't fix it.

I gave up kitty because the author obviously don't like tmux and is advising users not to use it. So it is more like a choice between kitty and tmux. Giving up kitty is easier for me in terms of features and time for retraining.

What's your reason to migrate from kitty to wezterm?

> What's your reason to migrate from kitty to wezterm?

My reason to no longer using kitty is simple: I don't like having to copy kitty's terminfo data to every single system I connect to in order to have my terminal work.

It's fine for those few systems I very often connect to, of course.

But I also connect to ephemeral systems, sometimes for a short session, and the toil and friction inherent in having to do that just isn't worth it.

Sure, "kitty +kitten ssh ..." can work in most people's scenarios. Didn't quite work in mine, due to various intricacies about my ssh setup - multiple ssh keys, handled mostly by ssh-ident.

wezterm Just Worked for me. As I got "back" to also using other systems like Windows and MacOS, it Just Worked there, too. No fiddling with terminfo, no fiddling with $TERM, either.

Happy days.

Your reasoning resonates with mine very much. I'll look at wezterm soon and hope it will works for me too.

> I don't like having to copy kitty's terminfo data to every single system I connect to in order to have my terminal work.

You can put LocalCommand directive in your ~/.ssh/config to scp something to the remote machine. I use it to have my .vimrc synced on all my systems.

> I tried the first line and in some situations (specifically with some remotes, i.e. kitty -> ssh -> tmux with that 1st line) it still won't fix it.

You likely need all of them ;-)

IIRC it "fixes" terminfo stuff "within tmux" for kitty regardless of what $TERM is set. Mind you, I was using the latest tmux at that time. tmux 3.2?

Here's the issue I had: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/3018

Looks like it should be fixed on a very recent tmux; otherwise this MIGHT help:

    set-option -as terminal-features ',xterm-kitty:RGB'

... or not.

I tried your solution using one remote server that I had trouble with before and it works! That's really great. This probably solves enough problems with kitty for me that I can use it until I find a better solution. (I am using Alacritty at the moment but it has other problems so that I have to use kitty as fall back for some situations.)

Thanks!

Is Kitty's startup time (~200ms) not unbearable for other people? Is it faster now or do people not spawn new terminals constantly?

I open new tabs or panes in my single terminal window, personally FWIW.

Great point. I was using i3/sway which is not conducive to terminal tabs or panes, but on my mac, kitty does sound pretty good, and 200ms is way better than what I'm getting now

you can run it with `--single-instance` (or `-1`) and you only pay (most of) that startup cost once.

Frankly, my shell startup time is that long. (fish, some configuration files, no effort at optimization)

That's a pretty hyper-optimized life, when 0.2 sec to get a command line is a problem.

> That's a pretty hyper-optimized life, when 0.2 sec to get a command line is a problem.

This made me chuckle :D. I supposed you're right. On my work rig, 200ms is a dream, so I suppose kitty would be great.

For personal programming, I use i3 and sway. The latency difference between my work mac and personal Linux is insane. Every little bit feels like molasses on Linux since it's the lowest latency system I've ever used.

I tried to try Warp, out of curiosity, and.... Are they fn kidding? A terminal that requires sign-up???

What in the actual hell.

Oh my god Fig too! Which of you is encouraging this crap??

I had the same reaction to having to sign-up to use a terminal?

I was this has gone too far—hell no.

Been a happy WezTerm for the past year or so.

Kitty's my daily driver on Mac (when I'm not using eshell, anyway), but on the Windows side I am actually pretty damn impressed with Windows Terminal over WSL2. I don't even bother using graphical mode on emacs in WT/WSL, it is smooth as butter and super responsive in terminal mode and aside from using Linux, I'm actually preferring it as a dev environment to a Mac these days.

In fact, it feels like there's an ever-so-slight latency when on a Mac that Windows doesn't have. At first I put it down to the keyboard feel, but even using the same keeb it feels a bit more 'squishy' on the Mac.

I really like Windows Terminal too. The one issue I have is that I have Ubuntu as the default session and when I open the terminal from the start menu (i.e., hit command key, type "terminal", and hit enter), it opens but loses focus. The only way to remedy it is to disable WSLg (GUI support). It's a long standing bug and a weird one at that.

Yeah, that and sometimes the WSL session takes forever to boot up (a good 10+ seconds for the first time, for me).

Once it's working it's fantastic. I don't know what it is with MacOS, unless they're subtly animating keypresses or something. Linux is as responsive as Windows is too. It's a wired keyboard so nothing to do with bluetooth.

I think that's the initial boot of the VM. I'v noticed it too.

Correct. If you run `wsl --shutdown` as an admin then start up Windows Terminal again the delay is back the first run.

I love Terminal but I can't get glances working on it correctly :(.

(I know, the task manager is good enough usually but not for having an overall view of everything, and not really for GPU usage. )

Also, Microsoft has their own new terminal program.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

> kitty I hate to be the sour consumer, but the kitty dev’s attitude I’d the main thing that turned me off kitty. Wanted to like it, couldn’t do it.

There are even YT videos about that. Not kittyng :)

My favorite is alacritty, although kitty is a close second, not a big fan of how kitty handles fonts/colors compared to alacritty.

I wasn't crazy about the proprietary nature of Warp, but I tried it and was sold almost immediately. I can use the same modifier-key commands to select and manipulate text that I'm used to, which feels super nice. They also provide such good sessionization out of the box that I don't really feel the need to install tmux or anything like that.

The problem is that Warp is closed source, requires a log in, has extensive telemetry, promised to go open source but never did and has raised 78M from VCs including 50M from Sequoia, the FTX people.

Indeed, VCs will want a return on their investment at some point, and it doesn't seem like simply sharing some terminal commands in the cloud with your team will be enough to justify that valuation. This is especially true as the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon of the last 15 years is now over.

Personally I'd never use something VC backed for something so critical to my productivity.

Having never heard of Warp and wondering what would get VCs to give that much to a terminal project I just took look at their website and it’s obviously the AI/LLM aspect.

With that said does anyone know which open source projects are looking at LLM integration. It’s not a bad idea.

I took a look before this year and it used to be that their value proposition was more so geared towards sharing terminal inputs and outputs easily. Now they seem to be leveraging OpenAI APIs instead as their main value prop.

However, I still don't really see why someone would pay 12 bucks a month for that when they could just pay a little bit more for full blown ChatGPT and use AI for much more than terminal commands (and there are already terminal and vim plugins to directly query GPT with your API key, which is orders of magnitudes cheaper than Warp). It seems like a product that has no clear target market or target usage, seems more like a feature than a full product.

Having an LLM run terminal prompts sounds like a recipe for disaster

It’s more about sophisticated replacement for tab completion.

I can just run Llama locally for that, no VC required (and indeed there are plugins which do exactly this already). Llama and other local LLMs are being optimized to run on the CPU on less than 1 GB of RAM so it's not as if only those with beefy GPUs can do so.

Agreed and the part I’m missing is these plugins which do this. Any suggestions or recommendations would be interesting to hear. Which terminals and which plugins etc.

Thankfully it doesn't run it, it just inserts the commands into your prompt. It's kinda nice but I've also been using the terminal for like 12 years, so I don't find myself relying on it very often.

It's not at all a bad idea as something like "optional plugin," but it's definitely absolutely a bad idea if we're also mentioning VC's.

> I can use the same modifier-key commands to select and manipulate text that I'm used to, which feels super nice.

I know this is not a complete solution, but just in case you weren’t aware, the keybindings in GNU Readline are nearly entirely configurable[1]. Getting some of the keybindings to work could require digging into serial terminal arcana[2], unfortunately, but here a terminal emulator that supports either the Kitty keyboard protocol[3] or the (venerable if impressively badly documented) modifyOtherKeys feature[4] could make things easier (messing with the serial driver[2] seems an overreaction to me, and you can’t get acceptable Ctrl-C behaviour that way anyway). The “new” terminal emulators mentioned in this thread (alacritty, contour, kitty, wezterm) should be able to do the trick, and of course xterm as well (probably rxvt too?); tmux compat needs help, though[5].

[1] https://tiswww.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#Bin...

[2] https://susam.net/blog/from-xon-xoff-to-forward-incremental-...

[3] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/

[4] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/modified-keys.html

[5] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/3335

Seconding kitty, a while ago I tried like a dozen of different terminal emulators and tested a lot of features including link clicking, escape code rendering, Unicode rendering and so on, and only kitty and Sakura have passed most of my requirements, with Sakura having one issue that I cannot recall that ultimately made me choose kitty. Built-in window splitting without tmux is also great. The only downside is that when you SSH into a remote machine without kitty's terminfo installed, you can't even use backspace or other common keys, which is annoying.

I went wezterm because kitty wasnt always playing nice with tmux and i dont think i would go back at this point there is something i juat like more about wezterm i cant put my finger on.

Both Ghostty and Terminal Click developed with zig, it seeems...

I've tried kitty twice, both times I found it confusing and went back to anything else

So, Ghostty will be BUSL, too?

Thanks for the links! Click is cool&bold in that it tries to get rid of all the obsolete baggage, pity it's in C, though

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