Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Terminal emulators are caught between emulating terminals and teletypes of the past and implementing new features and unicode is one of the struggles. The way most terminals and wcwidth handle the width of characters sometimes is not correct but preserving behavior is important for compatibility. It is possible that its just not worth trying to handle all unicode perfectly in a terminal. Its pretty good for legacy stuff and sysadmin. We have other ways of doing things remotely like html that might be more appropriate for ZWJ emoji and languages with complicated text shaping/rendering.by shirro
- I appreciate this analysis is on the state of terminal emulators, but I'm curious how well the integrated terminals that come bundled in code editors/IDEs also perform. For example, where does Zed's integrated terminal fit in the rankings? VS Code (and its derivatives)? JetBrains, Sublime Text?by ctippett
- I have been pretty happy with Alacritty for a while but just tried Ghostty and am a little bit mind-blown. The fact that it has a built-in theme picker is insanely convenient for people working on multiple computers at the same time(so the same theme might not work everywhere).
Overall, it literally looks like a better Alacritty alternative. The creator(s) did a great job!
by alkh - Some vaguely related things:
- VTTEST <https://invisible-island.net/vttest/vttest.html>, which tests capabilities from VT-100 to VT-520 terminals.
- Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 test <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt>.
by tmtvl - Pretty nice to see KDE's Konsole rank really high, especially if you take performance/test elapsed time into account. Considering it's a decades-older workhorse compared to the new star ghostty, not too shabby that it's kept up.by sho_hn
- It's interesting that none of the programs commonly known as "terminal emulators" actually emulate a terminal.. we can do that now though. https://zork.net/~st/jottings/Real-VT102-emulation-with-MAME...
I would avoid doing the PTY thing and instead do this (works on WSL if MAME is the windows version):
You can do the same thing with a vt220.$ sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:1234,reuseaddr,fork EXEC:"/sbin/agetty -L - 9600 vt102",pty,setsid,ctty,stderr $ mame -nomouse vt102 -rs232 null_modem -bitb socket.localhost:1234I've had an idea to try to write a sort of high-level-ish VT220 emulator that pokes and patches the ROMs and the system to let you control it with the mouse, paste and stuff, lets you just doubleclick it to get a terminal, etc... I forgot about that until seeing this. Nobody would use it for more than 5 minutes but it would be funny.
by unleaded - While the article title is true (errant is a very specific and concise word), to me it did not convey clear enough that this is just ucs-detect / unicode support (compliance?) ranking. The article title "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025" implied a larger comparison of terminal emulators than just ucs-detect.
Personally I also question the practicality or usefulness of this table because why should I care about having "the best unicode support"?
Curious, I briefly compared top ranked emulator (ghostty) on how fast it can print 10000 lines and it took 432ms compared to alacritty, ranked 18 (50ms), and Terminal.app, ranked 29 (50ms). If this is the trade-off to have the best unicode support, why should I want it? Why does it matter?
by eschatology - Work had me using the Windows Terminal for the first time ever after a life of developing on Linux. I got immediately hooked on the smart Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (without needing to use Shift like on Linux!)
For those not knowing, Windows Terminal uses Ctrl+C to abort the current process (as we'd expect) when nothing is selected, but copies when there is a selection. Similarly, Ctrl+V just pastes. So convenient!
by j1elo