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  • Hacker News
  • So the state of 2025 then tests a VTE that is from 2023? 4 major releases behind? And through a GTK 3 app, not even a GTK 4 one which will use the GPU?
    by audidude
  • They accept PRs on the ucs-detect project for updated test results.
    by aidenn0
  • Which one is that about specifically? Maybe the author could fix it.

    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).

    by embedding-shape
  • Likewise I noticed that Konsole was version 23.08. I've just submitted a PR (https://github.com/jquast/ucs-detect/pull/14) to update it to 25.08.
    by milliams
  • Interesting that xterm is written off as not supporting sixel, when in actuality it supports both full SIXEL and ReGIS and Tek 4010, with 24bit colour IIRC.

    It's just not enabled by default.

    by p_l
  • No love for Windows Terminal? I know that linux has a much richer terminal ecosystem, but WT ranks a lot higher than a wide breadth of terminal emulators on linux now. Could anyone have imagined that 10 years ago?
    by zadjii
  • I absolutely love it, it's my personal favorite. Using ghostty on MacOS instead.

    But I'm no power user.

    by epolanski
  • It's what I most miss from using windows. It handles tabs, theming and renaming of windows so well. Being able to tell at a glance what each window is connected to, it's purpose etc is very handy for me.
    by jscyc
  • In the test, Windows Terminal (weirdly written as "terminal.exe") comes up as #4 in the scoring table.

    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 :)

    by gschizas
  • Foot is excellent. Wayland only, but it is very fast to launch, and uses few resources. I love it.
    by christophilus
  • Foot is the best. Love ctrl-shift-o to open up links
    by colordrops
  • I agree. I started using Foot based on a recommendation from the notcurses library author, who has deep expertise in terminal emulation and collaborates with maintainers.

    A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.

    The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.

    by bdunks
  • Yep this is my current favorite too. I liked ghostty when I evaluated it, but for some reason it uses an order of magnitude more memory than foot to display a single, empty terminal.
    by ac29
  • I'm quite confused why this article tests foot v1.16.2, which is two years old at this point. The latest version is 1.25.0.

    By contrast, the tested version of ghostty v1.2.3 is two weeks old.

    by RVuRnvbM2e
  • 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
  • It does it fine with GNU Unifont and raw XTerm and others. I just had issues with RXVT and clones.
    by anthk
  • For glyph width, there are codepoints classified as ambiguous width. These are mostly narrow pre-emoji symbols that have been extended with an alternate emoji representation. There's no way to predict what their width will be, even with explicit variation selectors which might just be ignored.
    by kevin_thibedeau
  • 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
  • vscode terminal came in at number 32.

    https://ucs-detect.readthedocs.io/sw_results/vscodeterminal....

    by kartoffelmos
  • 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
  • I thought built in theme pickers were the norm…?
    by hnlmorg
  • I've always wanted to like Alacritty but they've had an open issue to support ligatures since 2017 and they're not in a rush to implement them.

    Now the only feature I need in Ghostty is Windows support.

    by chrysoprace
  • Same here. Any replacement I moved to needed to have content centering, where the margin around the cells is equal in both dimensions when the cells don't fit perfectly into the window. Kinda crazy that it's not a feature in a lot of terminals I checked over the years. I wouldn't even consider myself OCD, but it drove me nuts until I found a terminal that let me do it.
    by seanw444
  • The first time I went through the theme picker, I was tickled to see a theme I had made years ago included. Realized later it was due to it including all of the themes from iTerm2 Color Schemes automatically.

    It made for a more fun first experience with a terminal emulator than I expected to have.

    by OberstKrueger
  • The only thing I'm missing from ghostty is scrollback search. It's planned AFAIU, I hope it gets there eventually. Otherwise, ghostty has been pretty good.

    (I know you can fake scrollback search with tmux. It's not the same.)

    by mort96
  • 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
  • Konsole Just Works
    by whateveracct
  • Unfortunately Konsole has this feature that each time you switch tabs the maximized window shrinks by a couple of pixels (at least on Steam Deck)
    by TiredOfLife
  • Agreed. It's nice to be able to just use the provided terminal when running KDE. It's very customisable and runs plenty fast. I also love being able to right click on Dolphin and tell it to open Konsole in the current folder. Also, I leave infinite scroll back turned on in Konsole and it works really well, swapping out to a file as it gets too much scroll back. Nothing worse than getting errors that I can't read because the terminal discarded them. I have Ctrl+Shift+X bound to clear everything, which I use before running just about any operation.
    by yokljo