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> Kitty I don't remember why I rejected.

Maybe worth another look at then? I'm far from a Kitty power user, but it does pretty much everything else I want it to, including working as a quake-style terminal[0]. And you can extend it with kittens[1] if you so desire. Also, the next release should presumably include smooth scrolling[2] which I'm quite looking forward to.

Maybe more than any one feature though, I appreciate the hard work that Kovid (the creator of Kitty) has done to tastefully add new VT standards and try to make terminals as useful as they can be in the 21st century.

[0] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/quick-access-termina...

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens_intro/

[2] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/9330

Kitty is the best one. It has several features which have proven so useful I wasn't able to stay on anything else for more than a couple of hours (including the one this topic is about).

Ctrl+Shift+G wraps the output of the previous command into a pager (say, less). You often only know you needed a pager after that output is printed.

Ctrl+Shift+E highlights all links on the current screen and assigns short alphanumeric codes to them, so you can open links without using the mouse. For example, `Ctrl+Shift+E 1` opens the first link, `.. 2` the second one, etc.

Ctrl+Shift+U opens symbol search where you can find & insert symbols using their unicode names. Emoji, TUI blocks, rare accented characters you need once in a blue moon, CJK ideographs, whatever.

These small quality-of-life features make a big difference. In my terminal (TerminalNexus, Windows) I added per-tab session colors - click a palette icon, pick a color, and the terminal background and tab header change for that session. Simple but it's saved me from running commands in the wrong environment more than once.

Kitty is the GOAT terminal

I'm not the GP, but I do remember why I rejected Kitty when I tried several terminal emulators last years: it broke quite a few of my workflows.

For instance, in vim the F3 key was broken[^1]. It was very surprising and weird, and a portable workaround required some arcane vim configuration.

Another important pain point was that the font rendering was different in Kitty to any other app, and very dependent on the screen DPI. IIRC, for a DPI around 100, I had to switch to "legacy rendering" because the default rendering was barely readable.

I also remember issues with SSH. And Kitty crashed at least once. And I wasn't a fan of Kitty's mix of C and Python. After a week or two of usage, my Kitty config file was big, with an extra hundred lines of Python for the tabbar. Despite some nice features (like the shortcut to put the output of the last command into a file), I got uneasy with all this mess. I tried Ghostty, which was as good as Kitty with much less oddities.

[^1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/13328

Kitty is great, but its author has very strong opinions, strongly held; this keeps a number of popular requests summarily rejected. In particular, there is no way to color plain bold text, which is possible in basically any other emulator. This is a deal-breaker for me personally, it makes reading e.g. man pages unnecessarily hard.

WezTerm is a very good replacement.

> author has very strong opinions.

So true. To the point I have to maintain my own fork to make the command key my meta

Out of curiosity, what is the reason given to not color plain bold text ?

I wouldn't say I love tmux, but I have a configuration file that I put on every computer I use regularly that is very comfortable for me. I basically live in the terminal across many different machines, and having the same interface for managing panes and tabs even when using ssh is invaluable.

I also use vim (well neovim) as my primary editor, and have set up tmux to integrate well with it, so that might contribute to my appreciation and continued usage of it.

Yep, I've been using tmux for almost 10 years. Its config has followed me across every terminal I've used in Windows with WSL 2, macOS (work laptop) and native Linux. It's a nice abstraction over getting split panes, windows (tabs), sessions, search, scroll back, consistent key binds and the overall theme to work the same across environments.

If you spend any amount of time on remote machines with unreliable connections, local tmux is insta-reject because tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient. As with GP, it's also why I don't consider terminal emulators without tabs at all.

> because tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient.

Hitting c-b c-b isn't that inconvenient?

Agreed.

I hold Control and double-tap b for managing the remote session, then everything else is the same.

Granted, I'm not a power user, so there may be numbers that get frustrating. I could imagine complex splits getting confusing (I don't use splits at all).

C-b is less ergonomic than C-a that is the default on GNU screen. The first thing in tmux is to remap to C-a. (Triply so if you remap caps lock to ctrl.)

I went with C-a for quite a long time, but then I discovered that C-a is a keymap for jumping the cursor to the beginning and f the line, so I remapped tmux prefix to C-Space.

I switched to zellij, but I made more like my tmux was because I didn't want to learn new binding; C-q activates tmux mode. C-q + g locks so I can pass through comamnds to inner zellij. C-g unlocks. on super+enter for it opens a ghostty it and atached it to zellij session named $(hostname).

On reboot it remembers my tabs and panels and even commands that ran inside last (i.e there is popup in every panel that had something runing to run it again or just open a terminal)

Before my great wayland migration I ran patched st and it was great. Terminal job is render what terminal multi-plexer gives it and passes input to multiplexer.

Yep same, I install ohmytmux and I'm ready to go.

Foot is worth a look. It’s the only terminal I’ve ever seen that starts up in sub-50ms cold, without a service already running.

But you do have to run a proper window manager so you don’t have to require tab support in every single app. ;)

What proper window manager shows tab group list at the top of the current app window and allows shortcuts/mouse to reorder the list and also allows moving a tab outside of this list to another tab group?

Sway and i3. But when a WM does it, you can mix different apps in the same tab group, and your tab key binds can be the same as your WM key binds. You don’t have to remember alt+h for tabs, win+h for windows, etc.

But I’m just busting your chops, don’t listen to me. I don’t even use i3/Sway, or use tabs at all. Everyone has their own workflow that works best for them.

Scrollback does exist on Ghostty! But you need to switch to “tip”. This can be done in the config file. The tip build is very stable and has many bugs fixed (like various memory leaks).

Does it work all the time? I'm using tip and had scrollback stop working after a long ssh session.

Tip is good but depending on your platform you might need to build it yourself and then you need a particular zig version.

there's scrollback search in the nightly build if that's an option for you (I've been using it a ton for a few months and haven't seen any bugs so far):

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip

I haven't seen anyone else mention Terminology yet. It uses an unconventional GUI framework (Enlightenment / EFL), but that aside, it's fast and has more or less all of the features you'd expect of a terminal:

https://github.com/borisfaure/terminology

Its "moment" as a new novel terminal was over a decade ago, but it still chugs on working just fine. Notably(?), gregkh uses it (or used to use it):

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/greg-kroah-hartman...

Back in 2018 I thought it felt kind of sluggish and consumed quite a bit of resources, but looked pretty. Have they improved on performance since then?

Are you sure you're thinking of the same terminal? Its standout feature has been performance. Granted, that was 10+ years ago, but I've never noticed it regressing.

Yeah, I'm sure, used it for work on a Ubuntu box over the summer 2018, didn't bring it with me home.

You can search scroll back on Ghostty nightly. I switched straight from iTerm2 (after 20 years of iTerm), but _do_ remember the reason I rejected Kitty: it has a ton of Python in it, which is usually indicative of software which is going to be a pain in the ass.

> Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux.

Another option is to leave the tabbing to your window manager.

Cool, but I'm 100% clueless as to how. Haven't migrated to Linux yet and this one of the next important items for me to learn.

I like tmux because it does more than tabs in an emulator. I can detach from a session on a remote host to leave a process running after I disconnect, or to pick the session back up on another PC.

I do use tabs rather than repeatedly switching tmux sessions, but I do end up running tmux for splitting the GUI into side by side layouts.

Detaching is working just fine with `screen` as well.

I like the idea of tmux but as another poster suggested, I prefer to just get better at my window manager to achieve similar results. tmux requires way too many key presses for me.

> Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux.

Surprised none of the other commenters have mentioned zellij. I work across windows (WSL) and linux so really like having the same set up for both, which means no Ghostty/Kitty since they don't support windows.

Zellij is a lot smoother and nicer looking out the box, and its key shortcuts are pretty intuitive. There's a lit of advantages to not having an extra layer, but zellij + alacritty is definitely worth having in your list of options!

https://zellij.dev/

Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.

I'll wait for the stable release and will retest it. Not in a rush and not the early adopter kind of guy.

Give it "a week or two"

Very glad for that--it's what made me stop my evaluation the first time around. I looked for the feature in issues and just saw #9821 about memory use of the buffer which could be an issue if configuring very large scrollback as I do.

BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?

SecureCRT is a paid program I’ve used for years and it’s just so comprehensive. It’s not cheap but the quality shows.

I built a Windows terminal emulator (TerminalNexus) and scrollback search was one of the first things I prioritized. Ctrl+F opens a search dialog with regex and case sensitivity, and the buffer size is configurable per shell profile. No tmux needed.

Personally kitty is the only one I keep coming back too. Mostly because it's very customisable, fast, lean, ligatures, separate font for italics, great macro support, and supports automatic tiling panes.

> Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux. So much more key presses to achieve basic functionality, it boggles my mind why people love it. But, to each their own obviously.

Tabs usually mean mouse+click to switch which takes way more effort that a simple alt+number or similar keybinding used to switch "tabs" in tmux. I'd guess that some terminal emulator tabs allow keybindings to switch tabs as well but, modelling OP, I'm focusing on the expected default experience.

No, zero mouse usage, you can both address each tab by number and just moving between them. I wouldn't have any terminal emulator without the latter feature at least, and all I've tried support it.

I hate mixed mouse + keyboard workflows as well.

Just like zero mouse and same single keypress tabs w/ tmux... my point was that this is not a distinguishing characteristic of terminal tabs.

Been a long time since I last tried tmux but was not switching between panes something like Ctrl-B + Ctrl-<something_else>? I don't remember but if it was that it's still much more than Super-Left/Right.

Kitty has poor security

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084

That's a bold claim not backed up by your source.

You can turn on a feature documented as allowing the terminal to be controlled by escape sequences, but then output of programs can control the terminal! Whoop-de-do.