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In 2025, what features do you want in a terminal emulator? (that currently aren't widely available or at all) (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I'll start: After switching to Neovide from the terminal for Neovim, I got really hooked on the animated cursor and smooth scrolling (links to Neovide's features page). It wasn't until 2 months ago when the earlier was added to Kitty. I did so much overthinking about which terminal to use, and realized that I wouldn't (and don't) use most of the features provided by ones like iTerm and Kitty, though I picked the later. I was pleasantly surprised to see it added, even if it could use more work to make long smooth cursor animations like Neovide. The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can't believe there are no modern terminals with it.

(Somewhat) Side note: At this point many users realized that Ghostty got over-hyped, here is Mitchell Hashimoto's (dev of Ghostty) thoughts:

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 – Mitchell Hashimoto

I didn't anticipate the hype. Some people think I am lying when I say this. I'm not. I'm not so naive to think that private betas and exclusive access don't generate hype in principle. But I didn't think many people at all would be interested in a terminal emulator. I thought I was building boring software for a niche audience. No hype! But I was wrong, and the consequences were real. People were frustrated that they couldn't get in. People felt left out. People felt like I was being fake to generate hype. The waitlist grew larger than I was comfortable allowing in (given my prior stated priorities). I'm sorry about that. All I can say is that I didn't intend for this to happen. I ramped up beta invites to try to get as many people in as I felt comfortable with (well, a bit beyond that). We ended the beta at around 5,000 users in a Discord of 28,000 at the time. Not quite the percentage of access I wanted for people but more than I could handle.
...

One more negative aspect of the hype is the expectation of Ghostty being revolutionary. It is and it isn't. Ghostty has different goals and tradeoffs than other terminals. For those looking for those properties, Ghostty is a breath of fresh air and does things that no other terminal does. But for others, it's just a terminal. And that's okay. I hope you find a terminal that works for you and I don't claim that Ghostty is the end all be all of terminals.

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[-] nesc@lemmy.cafe 1 points 5 days ago
  1. Better integration with shell e.g. visual cues when something gone right/wrong, show when you have elevated priveleges.
  2. Word highlight with different colors and some presets
[-] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 2 points 5 days ago

I like kitty already.

Something to please consider is support for IME, so that you can input languages like Japanese and Chinese properly.

[-] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Honestly i prefer my console window to look a bit more "simple" - no background image, smooth animations, or anything like that.

The reason is that i prefer simplicity, clarity and efficiency over "beauty", animation, and smoothness, as the console window is a tool for work for me, not an art project.

Features that make sense to me, however, are :

  • being able to save the terminal output to a file, similar to tee, but after having typed the command.
  • larger "hidden" output buffer (more than the default 64K) - it doesn't show on screen, but can be redirected into a file later on
  • possibly also integration into other programs, for example being able to simply include a bash console into a dev environment.

also a feature like "format this output" would be nice - for example, cat doc.md and then "menu -> format as markdown" and it opens a new window where the markdown text is pretty-formatted.

[-] arjache@fedia.io 2 points 5 days ago

I use iTerm’s tmux integration all the time and would find it incredibly difficult to switch to another terminal emulator that doesn’t have it.

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I want it to render things quickly and to support light & dark themes.

Both konsole and alacrity have failed me there.

If it has any window chrome, I want it to look good.

Ghostty ... actually does everything I want pretty well, modulo some rendering glitches I attribute to GTK and fractional scaling.

Edit: I do like smooth scrolling, but I can live without it. I've used emacs for so long ... I'm just used to not having it for walls of text, even though I think slight smooth scrolling majorly improves readability of motion.

[-] horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Terminator does this well for me

[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Do you have a screenshot of what it looks like in 2024 (or I suppose 2025 lol)?

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

I've only ever used the default provided by my DE, which at the time of writing happens to be Black Box

this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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