Very customizable and extensible using Lua. Extensive documentation, native ssh support and built-in multiplexing.
Until Ghostty offers the scriptability found in wezterm and kitty (e.g., hit a keybind, spawn a new terminal and execute a font picker script), I am trying out wezterm, which is pretty great, but renders fonts too thin by default. I stare at this thing eight hours a day so text rendering is super important.
Now if the Kitty image protocol is so great and the Sixel stuff is so bad, ~~why is it only used in Kitty and Ghostty?~~
*Edit: it's also supported in Konsole, WezTerm, ... but still I'm interested in why we have 2 competing protocols right now.
Images as in "pictures" or is that something else? I'm using Alacritty, and I don't think I've once thought "I need to see this image inside the terminal" and I do deal with images and frames from videos a lot. Probably if I saw it being added to Alacritty I'd think it was adding unnecessary bloat, so I wouldn't be surprised not every terminal is rushing to implement it.
Or I completely misunderstand what you're talking about.
Off the top of my head.
[1] https://yazi-rs.github.io/
[0] https://www.osnews.com/story/26315/blit-a-multitasking-windo...
Once while working on a daemon that did both ML and DSP on live audio I added the ability to play sounds and display spectrographs of in-memory audio data at various points of the internal pipeline to debug an issue that would have been difficult otherwise. Way quicker than dumping WAV files to view externally.
That said, augmenting a shell-based workflow with tidbits such as this had me sold:
https://xcancel.com/thingskatedid/status/1316074032379248640...
https://xcancel.com/thingskatedid/status/1316075850580652032...
To achieve that, either Sixel or Kitty protocol is fine. IIRC Sixel works over SSH without any fuss, dunno about Kitty.
Kovid documented his rationale at some length here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/33
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...
there's lengthy discussion from just about everyone at this point in those threads, about why images in terminals is Hard
I wish there was a high performance way of remoting graphics over SSH. How cool would it be if you could SSH to a remote machine and it just showed you the remote desktop in the terminal itself? No messing around with port forwarding, weird X servers, etc.
I think probably that requires a full fat video codec like H.264 to work well though. Or maybe RDP?
Probably too many GUI naysayers and "What's wrong with remote X?" for this to ever happen though.
If it worked it would greatly reduce the hassle.
Think about all the TUI apps that exist. They're useful because they're convenient when working in a terminal, not because they look like shit.
https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
I have yet to use it though because Wayland still doesn't work properly for me (it doesn't restore the desktop properly after sleep) so I'm still on X11... without compositing... because KWin's compositor causes random freezes.
Yeay, Linux on the Desktop.
A terminal with in-band graphics primitives is called an RDP client.
We've had graphics terminals since RIP BBS's and even before that. If they were actually useful enough to be worth the bother, then we'd all have been using them all along and there wouldn't be posts like this.
It's not a case of there's this awesome idea that just for some reason no one knows about. No, it's just not that awesome of an idea. It's not harmful so it doesn't bother me that most xterms support tektronix graphics, it's just a gimmick of no real value. It's a solution to no problem.
Don't believe me? When was the last time you used passthrough printing? Or saw it being used even in some place where they do actually need to print? The terminals all still support it. It's just a thing that you don't need to do in-band in a tty, and today there is no reason to bother doing it that way even though you could. It's not better and does not solve a problem.
Kitty is a lot more complex: it accepts five different encodings, has three different ways to load the data, supports animations, etc. So it's no wonder only a few terminal developers had time to implement it.
See also: https://github.com/veltza/st-sx/issues/1#issuecomment-190272... 5000 lines (Kitty) vs 1000 lines (Sixel) even though the Kitty patch is just a "subset".
FWIW, it did get Powerline support and 24-bit color in macOS 26.
This is the actual end game of the worse is better philosophy.
9front's libc with a minimal desktop based on a tweaked rio(1) and a taskbar plus a really simple file manager won. People god fed up of FX' and bells and whistles everywhere. A minimal RTF editor with simple options plus a simple spreadsheet with rc/awk support does things much faster. Oh, and, of course, you can damn bind/import devices (video cards, network cards, whole networks) from anywhere to anywhere with IPV6 and quantum networks.
Old GNU/Linuxen, OpenBSD et all are just virtualized at crazy speeds under photonic CPU's.
There's no SSH, just rcpu and quantum-secured factotum(1). Photonic GPU's and neural network devices just boot 9front themselves too, with zero delay. Forget VPN's, too. These are obsolete too.
Edit- one example https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything
Overall, it literally looks like a better Alacritty alternative. The creator(s) did a great job!
SteamOS comes with Konsole, so that's what I've got installed in Linux. What am I missing out on by not using e.g. Ghostty?
(I know this article is about Unicode support, but I don't think I've ever had a hard time using a terminal because of its level of Unicode support.)
As to the "love" question, I still watch this video from time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE :)
EDIT: I love the easter egg with the names of the developers across the Windows timeline :)
- file management such as running "ls" where any filename has any non-ascii character such as a CJK or accented letter
- editing any text file in a terminal editor that isn't 100% ascii
- viewing/printing any data from any source, such as a log file/the web/'curl'ing something, where any language other than English or non-ascii character is used
- using various modern command line tools that insist on printing emojis in their output
Ugh. Unpopular opinion this but I personally find this practice repugnant. Same for when used in git commit messages, CI/CD task names and other such places. It just cheapens the quality of the product in my opinion
Graphical characters and symbols like ticks I’m fine with. I have no objection to people wanting to make the terminal pretty. But emojis in software feels like juvenile - like signing a formal letter with your gaming handle.
Is this something people actually want?
One of the reasons I enjoy using the terminal is because the text is of a fixed size and monospaced. Even colors and bold text can be distracting at times. I certainly don't want my terminal to render Markdown...
I imagine the feature could be disabled, but still. I'm all for improving terminal UIs, but let's not turn them into a web browser.
audidude•5h ago
embedding-shape•5h ago
Compared the results (https://ucs-detect.readthedocs.io/results.html#general-tabul...) with what I use day-to-day (Alacritty) and seems the results were created with the same version I have locally installed, from Arch/CachyOS repos, namely 0.16.1 (42f49eeb).
milliams•4h ago