I don't really dump megabytes of text into the terminal, they might have an edge there? (I found that xterm is much faster than xfce4-terminal for that.)

Any of the ones you mentioned would probably work good with nix too. I don’t really care about the config being scriptable at all, it was just the first terminal that easily let me set all of the keyboard shortcuts I wanted, so I stuck with it.

Wez is also cross platform so I get to use it on my Linux and Mac and my (Ugh) Windows work machine. Configuration being done in Lua is also something I quite like, but your mileage may vary on that one.

It shocked me when I got back into playing with multiple machines after over a decade that this mostly still does not exist.

Instead we’re finally doing gpu rendering (which is amazing but … surprising for this to be the 2025 topic du jour?)

1. quick-select the output in the terminal (select files/paths, urls, etc and either copy or paste them at the cursor). This is very useful as you often don't have the foresight to pipe the command to pipe the output of the command to some selection mechanism and even placing text on the line-editor is not that easy by default.

2. view images (sixel or kitty protocol). This is pretty useful visual analog to cat that doesn't require opening another program and works over ssh. Also for video.

There are some other nice utilities for doing things like downloading files directly in the terminal (it2dl for iterm and kitten transfer for kitty).

kitty doesn't work out of the box on macos if I remember; you have to set configuration for option/command etc.

- Access the scrollback buffer in neovim

- Access the last command output in neovim

- Animated cursor trails. It sounds dumb at first but I find that when sharing my screen, the cursor trails help other people keep track of my cursor when using neovim.

Here are my configs to quickly load @screen_scrollback or @last_cmd_output in neovim

map kitty_mod+z launch --stdin-source=@screen_scrollback --type=overlay /bin/zsh -c "nvim +$ +'nnoremap q ZQ'"

map kitty_mod+v launch --stdin-source=@last_cmd_output --type=overlay /bin/zsh -c "nvim +$ +'nnoremap q ZQ'"

* They're very fast and the scrolling is very smooth, especially on a 120 Mhz (ProMotion) refresh rate on MacBook Pros.

* While TMUX runs on all of them, they have built-in multiplexing, so you terminal sessions without requiring TMUX.

* Super configurable and in some cases programable

* Excellent typeface support, including ligatures, which I liker

* A quality of life issue: you don't have to copy and paste URLs; you just right-click them in the terminal.

* Excellent typeface support

I had used urxvt forever before and the simple solution that works (even for ssh e.g.) is to ring the terminal bell, and urxvt just sets the window urgency hint upon that. I just do that in shell prompt unconditionally because if it's triggered in a focused window, then nothing happens. But if it's from a different workspace, I get this nice visual cue in my top bar for free.

But features like setting urgency isn't available in wezterm (understandable, as it's not a cross-platform thing). I could patch that in the source, but the Emacser in me chose to do something more unholy. By default Lua is started in safe mode, which means loading shared C module is forbidden. I disabled that, and now use a bunch of missing stuff written in Rust and Zig interfaced with cffi. Don't recall ever having a crash so I am surprised by some of the other comments.

Though for me, I only wanted the absolute bare minimum, which Alacritty covers. I was sad to lose ligatures, but Alacritty is stable and very fast.

IIRC the maintainer was moving countries. Not saying that's the main or only reason, but it is likely a factor.