13 ms·

Okay, I Like WezTerm

488 points by alexpls 2y ago

CafeRacer 2y ago
I have work to do! I won't drop everything right now to check it... Okay, maybe for just a few minutes.
sidmitra 2y ago
https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/colorschemes/ https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/colorschemes/ ^ There's a host of built-in color schemes.
enricozb 2y ago
One thing I was looking for just yesterday was a way to dump my terminal's (alacrity) scrollback - escape sequences and all - to stdout. I wanted to pipe it to my text editor to search. Alacrity doesn't seem to have this unfortunately, but wezterm does with get-text.
- saurik 2y ago
  Have you tried xterm? It takes a bit longer to configure, as its defaults are universally horrible, but I've found the result to be worth the effort. FWIW, it has this feature you are talking about as part of it's "print" functionality. I bound ctrl-shift-P to print-everything() and then set printerCommand to `xterm -class modal -e sh -c 'vim +"setlocal buftype=nofile" +"g/^$/d" +"normal G$" - <&3' 3<&` (which might be crazy; I didn't think through it for very long). You can use printAttributes to tell it to include the format escape sequences, though (personally) I have that turned off for this purpose (as I find it makes it more difficult to search in my editor; but, again: I didn't spend much time on the editor side of this arrangement).
  - enricozb 2y ago
    Hmm I'll have to look into this. After some basic playing around with this feature it might be workable. In my head I had my editor taking over the current program in the terminal, and after exiting it would return to the previous program, but that involves some backgrounding and job manipulation that I haven't given too much thought. Thanks for the tip.
gtirloni 2y ago
The main feature for me is splitting panes. I used to that in tilix and got western working exactly the same (can't stand tmux , sorry). The Lua configuration is very intuitive as well. I do get some indirect crashes when Xwayland crashes, which is rare. I had to disable Wayland support in wezterm because the window decorations aren't great yet.
- abhinavk 2y ago
  Same. Panes and tabs are must in a modern terminal emulator. I like tmux but not on my workstation.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    I'm with you! tmux is pretty much a non-starter for me beyond a remote job manager. My window manager (Sway) already requires enough wild incantations. If any, I really appreciate simple integration in the terminal. A little more than 'foot' but not a lot. Tabs/panes, like you say. It gives some more granularity to the organization without a lot of new buttons to push. I've taken most of the Tilix defaults through several! Currently Kitty... though I may try WezTerm.
sodapopcan 2y ago
Nice write up, may try out WezTerm though I only just recently switched to Kitty and I don't like hopping around too often. Correction related to Kitty, though. It does not use either YAML or TOML, it has its own simple config DSL and is otherwise fully scriptable via Python.
- mobilemidget 2y ago
  same here, I just bookmarked it for now
replete 2y ago
iTerm's quake-style visor mode bound to a hotkey is too good to give up...
- marliechiller 2y ago
  This the the one feature keeping me from jumping. Its so handy!
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Often you hear it should be the desktop job to do this, but given most of them don't, it's moot.
  - replete 2y ago
    I wish I could bind applications to slide out from left and right, I use slidepad on Mac which is a slide out web browser, and TotalFinder which has a visor feature for the bottom. Little things like this keep me on Mac to be honest
  - rekoil 2y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong, but I want the feature. I have it in iTerm, and I don't in WezTerm. We can blame Apple if we want, but they are not going to implement this feature for us.
- lkuty 2y ago
  "quake-style visor mode" what is that feature? I am currently using iTerm2.
  - replete 2y ago
    In Quake, the video game, a console would slide down from the top of the screen when you pressed tilde. Combined with splitting terminals its incredibly convenient to have 4 or 5 terminals toggle on a hotkey
- eviks 2y ago
  dont think you need to give it up, there is a description on how to do that in https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/1751 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/1751
rdtsc 2y ago
I like it too, and have switched from iTerm2 to WezTerm recently. I tried some others, but WezTerm has window splitting which I use quite a bit so settled on it. Lua config is nice, although I am a minimal config kind of a person, so only have a few settings in there. Yeah, iTerm2 has a lot of other fancy features, but I just rarely or never used them, so don't really feel like I miss anything.
- replete 2y ago
  ITerm has window splitting btw
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    I know that’s why looked for something that also has it. Alacrity didn’t from what I could see.
throwaway1194 2y ago
Try it on Asahi next.
- throwaway1194 2y ago
  Why the downvote?
leblancfg 2y ago
Recently switched to WezTerm and I'm very happy. Was using kitty before that – loved the set up and simplicity coming from iTerm2. WezTerm is leaps and bounds better in terms of what comes out-of-the-box. My terminal config is short enough to sit all in one screen on my editor. After that, the terminal just... gets out of the way and I don't need to think about it. But the straw that broke my back with using kitty was, I'd end up encountering issues or trying to recreate some of iTerm2's features, only to end up time and again on kitty's maintainer's terse and dismissive comments. e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up.
- adumer 2y ago
  Interestingly enough, the article points out something I had the exact same terse and dismissive experience with kitty - following OS theme.
- saurik 2y ago
  Yeah: the kitty developer is definitely the sort who believes that he not only knows better than everyone else how to use a terminal, but that everyone else's opinions are fundamentally invalid. That his terminal fails to correctly render such stalwarts as the Linux "make menuconfig" UI and there are no settings to fix it as he doesn't believe in settings is, to me, telling. I then find reading his posts on issue trackers not just insulting, but even "activating" in a way that is really unhealthy, as it results in me feeling a need to "defend" some random bit of terminal usage with just as much vigor, lest he get away with making everyone else sound like THEY are crazy... it really isn't healthy. I can't know for sure--as we don't live in this reality--but I'd like to think that, even if he and I agreed on literally everything there is to do with terminals, that I'd still have the same mindset that I'd rather write my own terminal than ever use his.
  - actinium226 2y ago
    I guess this is what people mean when they say a piece of software is "opinionated"?
colesantiago 2y ago
There are so many terminals out there. Curious what sort of features and other things you look for when looking or comparing terminals like WezTerm and the like? What are your deal breakers and must haves of a terminal emulator?
- ishaanbahal 2y ago
  For me, speed, simplicity in configuration, and no AI is more or less a good start. I moved from iTerm to Warp recently, before switching to wezterm, and the only reason i dropped Warp (despite signing in) was that it comes in your way a lot, the click to focus on blocks becomes a hindrance for me (I hardly care for the previous blocks), the constant reminders in Red to update and obviously the AI prompting, albeit to the side, they keep trying to find a way for me to use it, but I'd rather stick with CTRL+R or quick google search than write a coherent sentence explaining things to a LLM. I left iTerm because I couldn't configure it to my liking, although there are certainly ways to do it, i just couldn't. iTerm2 is certainly a good enough terminal, wezterm just somehow suits my needs better.
greazy 2y ago
I've been using wezterm for more than a year. The defaults are very good. I need to look into all the advanced features.
vladstudio 2y ago
Upvote! I tried Mac Terminal, iTerm2, Kitty, Warp, etc etc, and settled with WezTerm. Easy to configure, fast, looks nice. I created a theme for it too: https://tiniri.vlad.studio/ https://tiniri.vlad.studio/
- pivo 2y ago
  I like your light Vlad theme, installed! Thank you!
- nop_slide 2y ago
  This theme is very nice! Any way to get it into JetBrains editors?
  - robotmachine 2y ago
    Seconded ^
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  Beautiful theme!
- kissgyorgy 2y ago
  Very nice!
- iamnotarobotman 2y ago
  Also tried these terminals as well but stuck with Wezterm in the end and its one of my favourites. I happened to have stumbled upon here to compare those terminals on this site: https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ Looks pretty useful to me or anyone else that wants to compare terminals.
- hosteur 2y ago
  I just want to say that I love your color themes! Would love one for Konsole and Sublime Text.
maztaim 2y ago
I'm a long time tmux fan, but I've been dealing with odd issues related to mouse actions. This is somewhere in alacritty, *vim or tmux. So I futzed with all of them, tried different terminals, all while telling myself it couldn't be tmux. So I just ignored it for over a year. I finally went back and gave wezterm a serious try just a few weeks ago and I am very happy to have switched. The mouse issues I was seeing go away. Splitting panes and resizing lots of panes is fast and responsive. It's built in so copying from a vertical split pane doesn't include the other pane like in tmux. That doesn't make it perfect. Mouse themes are applied inconsistently as I use Gnome on Wayland. It also seems to be a problem when using neovim, but I can't prove it clearly enough to want to file a bug with anyone. Besides, everything I need to do still works and I rarely use the mouse unless I am copying random gobs of text. I am sticking with wezterm for the moment. I have no reason to leave it at this point and it helped me reduce the complexity of my stack a teeny bit.
- bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
  for tmux replacement, check out zellij for a modern take. https://zellij.dev/ https://zellij.dev/
  - maztaim 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. I've tried this in the past. I feel no reason to try this with wezterm as what I need is already included.
- hypnotist 2y ago
  I use tmux daily. tried to like wezterm but issues with clipboard and resizing made look for another option. Very happy with Tilix now. https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ maybe less fancy/modern but absolutely rock solid every time. environment: fedora/wayland/gnome just throwing this out if anyone wants to test an alternative it out.
bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
Whats not to like of wezterm?? My favorite and often overlooked feature is that wezterm is fully cross os, so if you work like me in Linux, macOS and Windows, then you can just learn wezterm and be done. I even share large parts of my terminal config across os:es.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  that's where the language choices really matter I think. Lua as a programmable configuration language shines because it makes it quite easy to make environment specific changes. Also I think underrated side effect of Rust. A lot of the modern rust tooling has great cross platform support probably because there's a good abstraction layer between language and OS.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Isn’t that more just any language not C or C++? Go, Rust, Java, Python, etc all abstract away significant OS specifics. There are always going to be some thorny differences, but any modern language makes cross compatibility possible in a way that is more challenging for C.
    - blt 2y ago
      It's not just the language/library: build systems are also a big obstacle for x-platform GUI apps in C.
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  I used wezterm a long while after switching from urxvt. There was a GPU memory leak or something, becuase after opening a bunch of terminals, I found that Graphics in firefox started lagging and dragging. I switched to kitty (And Microsoft Terminal on windows), but I use tmux inside (apparently much to the authors annoyance). I should wezterm another look ...
  - tjoff 2y ago
    I've had similar issues the last few months and have had to switch back to alacritty on every machine I own.
benreesman 2y ago
Hardware accelerated ligatures. QED.
steelbrain 2y ago
Going to echo some of the thoughts of sibling posters. I'd been an iTerm2 user since I first started using macOS nearly ten years ago. I had really started to feel it slow down lately. It hit the breaking point when I was cmd-tab-ing and found myself waiting for more than a second just for the terminal to appear. Looked around, evaluated a couple alternatives and none of them quite fit my taste. One terminal required an account/login to operate, which is a big no IMO, another was written in {Java,Type}Script so simple commands like `yes` would break it due to the async nature of streams in node.js. I really like WezTerm so far. It's quite fast, very much configurable and comes with the theme I was configuring with iTerm2 out of the box (OneDark (base16)). My only trouble with it was in the beginning when I had to add the configs for cmd-left and cmd-right in lua config, I really hoped they'd be in there with the defaults.
- elashri 2y ago
  > One terminal required an account/login to operate, which is a big no IMO, another was written in {Java,Type}Script so simple commands like `yes` would break it due to the async nature of streams in node.js. Let me guess, that's wrap and Tabby or extraterm respectively?
throwaway1194 2y ago
Does anyone know what the default colorscheme is on wezterm?
ishaanbahal 2y ago
Thank you for this write-up! Going to copy a couple of things to my config. TIL, Wezterm has a command palette. Wezterm with Zellij becomes amazing with how it just simply gets out of the way, even lets you remove window decorations entirely. I've heard Wezterm has a multiplexer too, but just haven't tried it.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > I've heard Wezterm has a multiplexer too, but just haven't tried it. You're in luck, the last half the post is about that.
  - ishaanbahal 2y ago
    Did go through it, bookmarked for use, that's how I learned about the command palette, just hard to break the habit of using zellij, that too with tmux mode :D
    - zamalek 2y ago
      I migrated from zellij, here's a vaguely similar config to it: https://codeberg.org/jcdickinson/nix/src/branch/main/home/common/files/wezterm/wezterm.lua https://codeberg.org/jcdickinson/nix/src/branch/main/home/co...
globular-toast 2y ago
A problem I have when I see stuff like this with tabbed interfaces, splitting etc. is it's all at the wrong level of abstraction and compensating for a hopelessly deficient window manager. If you use a window manager like sway then you can layout tabs, splits etc. to your heart's content for any type of window you like. You don't need a terminal emulator to do this for you. Given that I do already use a window manager like sway, is there much else worthwhile compared to any other terminal emulator?
- eredengrin 2y ago
  Wezterm has built in ssh support where if you open a wezterm ssh window to a remote host and then open new tabs/splits within that window, the new tabs/splits are added as part of the existing ssh session automatically. It also allows you to host the session on the remote machine (kind of like tmux) and when you connect you get back all your previous tab/split organizations. From that perspective it can make sense to have the terminal own the layout organization.
binary132 2y ago
In my experience Wez has been shockingly responsive to GitHub issues and usually fixes things (if they’re actually wrong) within a day or two. I’ve only found one or two minor quibbles involving modifier keys over SSH and overall the functionality is basically perfect for my needs. Plus it’s nice and fast. (Former avid Alacritty user but needed better modifier support for remote emacs.)
- bbkane 2y ago
  Yes!! I opened an issue ( https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4917 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4917 ), and not only did he answer it and my side question, he merged the two PRs I made to fix it super quickly!
  - yonatan8070 2y ago
    A bit of a tangent, 3 days ago I opened a small issue with RiMusic, not only did the maintainer reply within a few hours, they implemented the feature I requested and it is already in the F-Droid build running on my device
- hrez 2y ago
  I didn't have as positive experience. Granted I commented on a closed issue. In any case it was closed as "won't do" and my comment was ignored. I didn't feel like opening a new issue for the same that was already dismissed. https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4706 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4706
  - naikrovek 2y ago
    Yeah Wez is limited by tmux behavior. If tmux breaks up one line into many, wezterm can’t undo that. Wes is right about wezterm domains though. The native domains feature and pane support I think will meet the needs of most.
    - hrez 2y ago
      It's the same with no tmux. And it's fine with other terminals. See my comment in the issue.
xrisk 2y ago
You can dump iterm2s config into a file and sync it to other machines. Granted it’s not meant to be edited directly but rather via the GUI, but yeah it’s possible to persist it if you want.
- kamikaz1k 2y ago
  Every time I’ve tried to do that, it doesn’t carry over. Does it support all the configurations?
rob74 2y ago
I originally installed WezTerm because I switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu and wanted some of the features of Konsole (infinite scrollback, searching the scrollback) without actually installing Konsole (I know you can install it under Gnome too, but it just felt... wrong). And yes, it instantly grew on me, although (as I can see from this article) I have barely scratched the surface of its configurability. My only complaint is that its many features are not really discoverable. Sure, the documentation is really good, and the author is very engaged and helpful, but... one example: I looked up how to select large blocks of text using just the keyboard, I did it once, said to myself "I have to remember this!", then promptly forgot it and now I'm back to selecting text with the mouse like an absolute noob because all in all for the few times I do this it's faster than googling that documentation page again... (in case you're wondering, the page I mean is https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/copymode.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/copymode.html, not https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html, which sounds like what I was looking for, but is something completely different - also very handy and a great idea, but not what I was after)
- bbkane 2y ago
  I keep my Wezterm config in a dotfiles repo and I keep notes like this in the README ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm ), precisely to find them easily later!
- barnabee 2y ago
  Quickselect mode is amazing though! It's useful out of the box but the superpower is that you can customise the regexes it matches. I've added one that finds all the filenames output by 'eza --icons' (\p{Co} matches the icon) so I can instantly type (by using shift+the quickselect letters) any filename after doing an ls (aliased to eza).
- ajaxnet 2y ago
  A side question, why switching from Kubuntu ? Because I'm thinking to install it.
- monzool 2y ago
alberth 2y ago
OT: I'm most excited by Ghostty (created by the founder of HashiCorp). https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh
- lytedev 2y ago
  What are you excited about concerning Ghostty? I revisit the project every once in a while, because I think Zig has a wonderful and bright future, but I don't think I could ever use a terminal emulator that isn't completely open-source. WezTerm has an _enormous_ leg up over Ghostty in this regard IMO.
  - alberth 2y ago
    > Ghostty is still a private project. I plan to open source it one day and share it with more people but for now this is a private personal project. https://mitchellh.com/ghostty https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
  - matricaria 2y ago
    Ghostty will be open source once it is stable enough.
    - ayhanfuat 2y ago
      Public beta is planned for this year.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- matricaria 2y ago
  I love Ghostty. On my old MacBook, it was by far the fastest terminal emulator (yes, I tried all of them, also WezTerm and Alacritty). Now on my new Mac it is still the most beautiful terminal emulator.
- lawn 2y ago
  It feels like I've been waiting for an invite a long time now. I'm eager to try it out. Then again, I should probably try WezTerm first.
FL33TW00D 2y ago
WezTerm is just so much faster than iTerm2, wish I had switched sooner! Video demonstrating the speedup: https://x.com/fleetwood___/status/1807772624518316495 https://x.com/fleetwood___/status/1807772624518316495
- abhinavk 2y ago
  Is it better in typing latency though?
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    ..you have noticable latency when you type? I'm genuinely sorry, that would infuriate me. Personally I don't notice any typing latency in wezterm. I have p10k as a zsh theme and not really any 'plugins' beyond git for the terminal and use neovim+ also pretty much just got and CoC for an editor. I don't notice any latency when typing and, while not instant, still sub 200ms startup latency.
    - fmajid 2y ago
      Dan Luu had studied terminal input latency: https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ iTerm2 was shockingly bad, for instance, at 44ms vs 6ms for Apple's default Terminal.app. That right there is a deal-killer as far as I am concerned.
      - hughesjj 2y ago
        Wow, and that's before plugins. I remember being so frustrated with a Mac because of the animations. It would take like a full half second to maximize etc. I tried disabling them but then it would just do a cross fade or something and still be unresponsive when I tried to type/click on the focused window. That plus cmd+space doing nbsp and Ruby (required by our IaC framework at the time) treating such differently than other whitespace was the end of my experiment, back to Linux lol (I have no problems with Mac users and get the love for them, but I definitely prefer Ubuntu)
  - 2y ago
adem 2y ago
I tried WezTerm on Windows because I was looking for a terminal with ligature support and lower input latency than Windows Terminal. Unfortunately, it still had higher input latency than cmd.exe. The only terminal with ligature support that comes close in terms of input latency is contour (https://contour-terminal.org/ https://contour-terminal.org/).
- eviks 2y ago
  did you measure latency? Curious as to how big the difference is
  - adem 2y ago
    I can't provide you with numbers but back when I used Windows on my work machine, I recorded my screen + microphone input using OBS to compare they recorded keystroke sound and appearance of the character on my screen. I was able to confirm my suspicion in that WezTerm yielded higher input latency. This was especially noticeable when using helix inside of WSL - movement in normal mode would always sort of lag behind the keystrokes. EDIT: Just installed in on my Mac and here, I can't notice any difference between kitty (my current input latency baseline) and WezTerm. Good stuff! Not sure how Windows fares nowadays, though.
    - wongogue 2y ago
      I don’t know if it’s my setup or just Windows quirks but even Alacritty feels slower than Windows Terminal. You can also use Is It Snappy? from the App Store to test typing latency. It was made by Chad Austin who had problems similar to us. https://chadaustin.me/2017/04/announcing-is-it-snappy/ https://chadaustin.me/2017/04/announcing-is-it-snappy/
bloopernova 2y ago
Oh, very cool that it uses Lua for its configuration. That opens up a massive potential for new behaviours and customization. Emacs uses Lisp in a similar way. What other applications use a programming language for their configuration?
- awesomelvin 2y ago
  Not sure if it counts but the suckless project (e.g. st or dwm) use C (its source code) as config :)
- lawn 2y ago
  Neovim is the obvious example here, also relying on Lua. Neovim of course also supports Vimscript, although writing anything more complex is much nicer in Lua.
- bbkane 2y ago
  NeoVim also uses Lua and I think nginx does too.
- radlad 2y ago
  awesome-wm!
- kragen 2y ago
  probably the most popular instances of this approach are firefox, chromium, and safari. the unix shell, godot, unity, unreal engine, truetype, and postscript are probably also worth a mention
- kccqzy 2y ago
  XMonad (a window manager) uses Haskell.
weinzierl 2y ago
So many comments from people coming from iTerm. What do you have in your WezTerm config to make it more like iTerm?
- spartanatreyu 2y ago
  As a fellow iterm2 refuge, here's my config: https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/fe6d045c3113f27acaa509c3fdc6b736 https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/fe6d045c3113f27acaa509... I added back the familiar option/cmd + arrow key navigation and cmd + click hyperlink behaviour. There's also some tweaking to make it more similar to iterm's default behaviours (e.g. don't hide the mouse when you start typing). And finally some personal visual tweaks which you can throw out and replace with your own.
linsomniac 2y ago
I've been using wezterm for around a year, and sponsoring Wez on github, and it's been a fantastic terminal and he's a great developer. One of the things I love most about it, which the article mentions it is not going into, is the quick copy and other copy modes. I use them All. The. Time. C-S-Space and type the letters that appear next to the item you want to copy. One big use case I have is: mosh+tmux-like functionality from my macos laptop to my work Linux machine. I always have a session running so I can do things on my work machine from my Mac. It gives a re-connectable session plus panes and tabs so I can do work when I'm away from my desk. It's top notch.
- ursuscamp 2y ago
  One really cool feature of the quick copy mode is that if you do the uppercase version of the letters it will automatically paste the value back into the terminal prompt.
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    Agreed, I use that for probably 80% of my copies. Also works in the regular select, if you "Y" instead of "y" it yanks and pastes.
- Graziano_M 2y ago
  Wow TIL about that QuickSelect. I will be using that a lot.
kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
[dead]
eviks 2y ago
> My favourite WezTerm feature is its use of Lua for defining config. That's indeed one of its best features (despite the warts of the language) as you're not as limited in what you can do vs. the data serialization alternative
kelsey98765431 2y ago
I will literally switch OS to anything that can implement iTerm2's tmux integration.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  I only use tmux on remote machines (because Terminal has all of the features I want and don’t need session management locally). Does anything integrate with remote tmux? It would be great to get native tabs for remote tmux windows.
  - kelsey98765431 2y ago
    Yes, i literally sometimes need to manage dozens of machines at once, all with various tmux sessions monitoring tasks etc. being able to use the same keybinds for split pane, move between pane, smooth scrolling WITHOUT entering tmux curses based scrolling mode, and local buffering... number one reason i main macos after using linux for decades. EDIT: the command is `tmux -uCC a` to connect to a tmux session, works locally and works over ssh. spawn the tmux session normally, disconnect, then connect via command mode for best results. you can still spawn a new one with just `tmux -uCC` but i have found i can get some issues when i spawn it in command mode vs attach in command mode.
  - galkk 2y ago
    Iterm2, as parent mentioned. Run tmux -CC on your remote server in your iterm2 and you’ll get native windows for tmux panels
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      Nice. I had no idea!
    - epiccoleman 2y ago
      I can't believe I'm just learning about this today!
- E39M5S62 2y ago
dmd 2y ago
The one thing that keeps me on iTerm2 is Edit->Selection Respects Soft Boundaries. "When enabled, vertical lines of pipe characters | will be interpreted as pane dividers (as in vim or emacs) and selection will wrap at them." (For me, it's selecting text in irc.) https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/596 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/596
- jph 2y ago
  Yes 100%. This is a superb UI/UX feature once you see it in action.
- nixosbestos 2y ago
  Meanwhile zellij just supports this natively if your terminal supports the right OSC thingy. Which it does if you're in this thread. edit: rough, my bad. missed the via "in irc" part.
  - dmd 2y ago
    Reread my comment.
- ledauphin 2y ago
  i've been using iterm for... years and had never noticed this setting. Which is a killer feature for my use of emacs. thanks!
- dmd 2y ago
  (self-reply) This is basically the Microsoft Word bloat problem. NOBODY needs all the features, but everyone has 10 niche features they want, and nobody wants the same 10. So to get 10 niche features, you accept bloat.
- yonatan8070 2y ago
  That sounds incredible, is there any terminal that supports it on Linux?
zoidb 2y ago
Nice to see wezterm on the frontpage! For anyone giving it try beware that link detection doesn't work super well for links containing a `)` character which is something you run into frequently on markdown documents. More info in https://github.com/wez/wezterm/pull/4212 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/pull/4212 which has a workaround.
roydivision 2y ago
I recently changed from Alacritty to WezTerm due to bugs in the former and I don't have any complaints so far. It is part of my daily professional workflow, works well with Tmux, under WSL. Great piece of software.
- robinsonrc 2y ago
  I went in the other direction and use Zellij for multiplexing. It works well for me, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the Ghostty public beta to see how that compares. Great to have all these good options.
- CoolCold 2y ago
  for myself, I couldn't find good reasons to keep using WezTerm vs Windows Terminal - not saying WezTerm is not capable terminal, of course.
skim 2y ago
Wez is coming out with a book too on systems programming in Rust. https://leanpub.com/sysprog https://leanpub.com/sysprog
test1235 2y ago
I've been using wezterm on windows for a while and still not managed to work out how to close a split pane. Is this a bug?
andrewfromx 2y ago
Things I noticed using it: != goes to weird ≠ utf8 char. I like != better! Command-K clears the scroll back but NOT the screen. Updates: config.harfbuzz_features = {"calt=0", "clig=0", "liga=0"} Command-L
kokada 2y ago
I also recently switched to WezTerm because it is the only terminal that seems to work cross-platform that is also well supported in Nix/nixpkgs. Before I was using Kitty in NixOS and iTerm2 in macOS, but having one configuration for both OS is good. P.S.: I am temporary back to Kitty in NixOS because I recently switched from Sway to Hyprland and the current release of WezTerm seems to be having some issues in Hyprland. But will switch back once this issue is solved, I know it is fixed in the main branch for example, but I would prefer to use nixpkgs cache instead of building it from source.
- Macha 2y ago
  Kitty works on macOS too?
  - kokada 2y ago
    Yes, but when I did the migration Kitty wasn't supported in macOS in nixpkgs (i.e.: nobody did the package integration). Now looking at the package it looks like it should work, but I now think WezTerm being superior in at least a few things (e.g.: the Lua configuration file is definitely nice).
KingOfCoders 2y ago
Would like to switch from Tabby on Windows to WezTerm, but would wish the Win installer would setup WSL2 so it just works. For now I don't want to get into learning a Lua config.
- nusl 2y ago
  Windows' terminal has integration directly with WSL2; https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
vijucat 2y ago
If I'm fiddling with the terminal or the font, I know it's because I'm procrastinating. I've trained myself to quickly recognize such side-quests and feel a quick punch of hormonal urgency, which helps me get back to work (with mintty and Consolas). You don't need the bells and whistles.
- qweqwe14 2y ago
  This, unironically, is entirely correct. Some people spend way too much time configuring stuff that doesn't matter. "If you've never spent hours ricing your OS, you have no heart. If you still do, you have no brain."
- pmarreck 2y ago
  That's correct if it's always or very often your M.O., but if you rarely mess with it? How about if you spend some time fixing any annoyances that have accrued over time thanks to "involuntary unpaid vacation time"? For example, I recently reduced my terminal startup time to 1/3 what it was by putting in some optimizations. I'll be able to benefit from that for basically forever. ... Ah, you develop on Windows? This tracks, then... All productivity, no aesthetics >..<
  - vijucat 2y ago
    As an aside, I'm surprised how Apple fans think they're the one with the aesthetics advantage when their Lord and Master allowed them to change the color of their menu bar in...2023? :)
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      That's why I'm a NixOS guy now. Mostly. ;) The main thing holding me back is the Apple ecosystem integration with my other iOS devices.
      - vijucat 2y ago
        That's hardcore. I admire people who work on Linux (I just use WSL 2 Ubuntu on Windows). Apparently, NixOS has it's fans! See: https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/14clrjh/how_is_nixos_not_the_most_popular_distro/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/14clrjh/how_is_nixos...
alskdj21 2y ago
As a neovim user, wezterm's lua config was a welcome surprise. Imo, its best feature is its command palette (Shift+Ctrl+P). Tremendously helps when you're just getting started. It has also a superb font-related configurations. I do hope I could map specific Unicode codepoints to a particular font, as is the case with kitty. In terms of use-case, I just disable all its keybindings and use it as a tmux terminal. I admit I didn't look for solutions, but I just can't go away from tmux's session restoration capabilities.
selectnull 2y ago
Like a few people in this thread, I was a decade long user of iTerm2. Can't really remember what was the reason to research other terminals, but I did and among those I tried, WezTerm was the clear winner. I vaguely remember my main requirement was being able to configure CMD+D and CMD+SHIFT+D as split panes vertically and horizontally as I wasn't willing to retrain my fingers to learn new keystrokes for that. Within a version of two after I switched (back then, those were weeks or less apart), all my complaints were resolved and I never looked back. My config is fairly minimal, but perfect for my needs. What else can one want?
anothername12 2y ago
What are you all doing that requires such fine grain selection of a terminal? I spend a lot of time in a terminal and just use whatever’s there. Terminal.app or gnome-terminal. Before that it was xterm. Perhaps the only customization is modifier key on Mac as meta.
deleted 2y ago
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kccqzy 2y ago
At a previous employer (Google) I really enjoyed using iTerm2, especially its tmux integration (`tmux -CC attach`) and shell integration (the terminal being aware of shell prompts and shell commands and outputs so it can do something intelligent). After switching employers I no longer have a Mac to run iTerm2 in. So I decided to simply reduce the number of apps I require by running my terminal inside Emacs. The emacs-libvterm project is excellent. These days I no longer need a terminal emulator app.
terraplura 2y ago
Been a long time user of Alacritty but recently switched to WezTerm. Set up was super quick and having graduated control over opacity and blur was brilliant. Also love that it supports Font Ligatures. Btw one gotcha on macOS during setup is that the left Option/Alt key does not emit the usual special character mappings, but the right Option key does. You can configure that too! Cheers Wez!
- nebben64 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing! Just curious, what made you switch from Alacrity? (I was also debating it vs. WezTerm)
  - terraplura 2y ago
    Apart from the granular blur control. It was mainly the ligatures support, Alacritty’s developer doesn’t seem too keen on it. And it seems to be the only terminal that renders the ANSI blinking escape code properly (although I don’t think it distinguishes rapid and slow blink). I think it’s a cool feature! Unlike OP, I hardly use WezTerms features. I have hidden the tabs away and just use the old vim+tmux combo. So my config is just 25 lines. There was no weird colour interaction issue that alacrity+vim+tmux had (and there is a famous gist for). All which is to say I didn’t have to dive deep to migrate.
    - nebben64 2y ago
      makes sense, thank you for the insight :)
theusus 2y ago
Even though Wezterm has lots of options but it's slow compared to Kitty and maybe even Windows terminal
- Ringz 2y ago
  Yep. Tried Wez and switched back to Kitty because it’s much faster.
  - lambdaba 2y ago
    on which platform?
    - Ringz 2y ago
      Windows. Didn’t test it on my MacBook M1. Both running nvim with the same config.
    - benfrain 2y ago
      macOS for me. Zipping up and down a buffer is noticeably faster (drawing/render wise) in the latest Kitty compared to WezTerm. Using 2019 Intel MBP
WD-42 2y ago
It’s a great terminal but still a bit warty on Linux/wayland. Unfortunately Wez is on OSX, I assume.
- 9front 2y ago
  WezTerm is available for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD also. See https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/installation.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/installation.html
dgacmu 2y ago
Ah, rats. It looks nice but to save others a bit of searching, if broadcasting to multiple panes is a requirement for you (something I use often in iterm2), it's not yet supported and not planned for support: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/2658 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/2658
- eredengrin 2y ago
  Wez left the issue open and said "I personally have no plans to implement this any time soon.", so I have to imagine he's open to PRs. He just has other things to spend his own time on.
eigenvalue 2y ago
I'm looking forward to the eventual release of the new terminal that Mitchell Hashimoto has been working on for fun for a few year, Ghostty. From what he has shared online so far, it looks really awesome and well designed.
auditor_3d 2y ago
I have tried so many I can't count. I have settled on one that seems to be not as well known but should be. Black Box Terminal. It checks all kinds of great boxes for me, I love it. https://github.com/yonasBSD/blackbox-terminal https://github.com/yonasBSD/blackbox-terminal
- ivanjermakov 2y ago
  What "great boxes" do you have that more popular terminal emulators are missing?
jpeeler 2y ago
Can lazy internet help me replicate kitty's word selection (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/) in WezTerm? I believe one would just have to adjust the config for "quick select": https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/quick_select_patterns.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/quick_selec...
myst 2y ago
Am I a rare one being happy with Terminal.app?
- abathur 2y ago
  I'm pretty happy with it. I try alts when they come up since I might like to use the same thing on macOS and Linux, but I've yet to try one that both has the right features and doesn't feel sluggish.
- robinsonrc 2y ago
  I was until I started needing things like true colour support and was forced into trying other options. But if you haven’t noticed anything missing or not working with software that you use then Terminal.app is a fine choice
- Myrmornis 2y ago
  It doesn’t support terminal hyperlinks, which are produced by many tools nowadays (rg, fd, ls, delta).
  - myst 2y ago
    I have no idea what you are talking about.
    - Myrmornis 2y ago
      Ah, OK. Basically many terminal emulators allow you to create text that is clickable, with the click going to an arbitrary URL. That could be a URL on the internet, but there are more interesting possibilities: e.g. you click on a line number in your terminal and it opens in your editor / IDE at that line number. The standard link that started it is https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3c..., but if you do internet searches for terms like `terminal hyperlinks ripgrep` or `terminal hyperlinks ls` or `terminal hyperlinks delta` you'll find more.
pmarreck 2y ago
Nice! I've been using Wezterm for a couple years. I use the Embark color theme, which I don't see represented on the wezterm themes page: https://github.com/dmshvetsov/wezterm-embark-theme https://github.com/dmshvetsov/wezterm-embark-theme I also like a slowly-blinking block cursor, a specific font, ligatures etc. Feel free to raid my config: https://github.com/pmarreck/dotconfig/blob/yolo/wezterm/wezterm.lua https://github.com/pmarreck/dotconfig/blob/yolo/wezterm/wezt... I love that I can use the same config on macOS and Linux as I use both machines often.
core_dumped 2y ago
I’m glad WezTerm is getting the attention it deserves. I just wish he’d change the icon though… it needs a facelift!
- michael_michael 2y ago
  Yeah. I wish subtle design cues didn't turn folks off from useful software. That said, when I was test driving terminals a few months ago, I saw WezTerm and just skipped it because the main image shows the opacity-enabled terminal with a Cyberpunk image in the background, and that just seemed…amateurish? Dunno. This article is convincing me to give it a second look.
- ObscureMind 2y ago
  https://github.com/mikker/wezterm-icon https://github.com/mikker/wezterm-icon
junon 2y ago
Big Wezterm fanboy here.
tracker1 2y ago
I'll need to look at it again. Mostly been using Tabby lately, which I like aspects of, but it can be sluggish. I really like the new Microsoft Terminal for Windows, but it's Windows only, unfortunately and I mostly use Linux and Mac. I looked at WezTerm a long while ago, didn't even realize I'd already had it starred. Will try it out again soon. It's just another one of those things, that I prefer to use the same applications (if I can) on all the platforms I use.
el_memorioso 2y ago
I used WezTerm for a while and loved it, but then I discovered it had some strange interactions with other programs that use the GPU or OpenGL. In my case, when running WezTerm, the robotics simulation tool Gazebo Classic [0] would only launch properly 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. The rest of the time the simulation appeared to start, but no display ever came up and the program eventually segfalted. I thought this was a Gazebo problem, since it is a bit touchy, but switching to another GPU-accelerated terminal like Kitty or Alacritty solved the problem. I guess the lesson being, if your GL program is misbehaving when launching from WezTerm, try another terminal to see if that doesn't solve the problem. [0] https://classic.gazebosim.org/ https://classic.gazebosim.org/
aftbit 2y ago
I really _want_ to like WezTerm but the font rendering just looks bad compared to Alacritty. I understand that this is a very personal feeling and plenty of people like the WezTerm way better... but not me. The author is not interested in trying to fix this issue, which is totally fine, as they point out font rendering is very subjective, but I'm also not willing to use a terminal that looks worse, even though I like many other things about it better. https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/5331 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/5331
- hughesjj 2y ago
  Oh man, fonts are fun. Ironically I moved off of alacrity and on to wezterm for font rendering reasons (p10k+patched nerd fonts), but that was pre pandemic
  - taejavu 2y ago
    I’m using patched nerd fonts seemingly without issue on alacritty, were your problems specifically with p10k?
- taejavu 2y ago
  Oh wow I was expecting it to be slightly worse, like the subpixel rendering wasn’t quite right. But that is _bad_, to the extent it looks like a totally different font. Dealbreaker.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  I gave WezTerm a spin and it had some showstopper bugs rendering my preferred font (including a vertical offset on "b" to the extent it looks like "h"). Something's definitely not right here.
- spartanatreyu 2y ago
  I'd probably try a few fonts first just to see if it's an issue with rendering, or if the font itself is problematic since sometimes it's the font's fault itself when it's being used in a different environment. (font internals are a crazy rabbit hole to dive down) Besides, if you're trying another terminal it's also a great excuse to try other things too! I'm a fan of tools like these where you compare a series of option pairs (in this case font pairs) in succession until it spits out your most preferred option: https://www.codingfont.com/ https://www.codingfont.com/
tambourine_man 2y ago
This looks very interesting. I’ll have to look at it closer later. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html Thanks for posting
alexcaza 2y ago
As a fellow iTerm2 to Wezterm convert this hit home. There’s loads of useful stuff in here, too! Thanks for the write up. I particularly like the projects setup. I built Weztermocil to achieve something similar that uses itermocil’s configs since that’s what we use at work. https://github.com/alexcaza/weztermocil https://github.com/alexcaza/weztermocil
robxorb 2y ago
Just tried it. I liked how easy it was to set up colours/fonts etc, using the config file. But I hit a snag. On macOS, it's standard that in any text window, to select everything for copying, you hit Command-a. But Command-a in wezterm just printed an "a" character. What? I spent a while looking in the docs and issues, but couldn't figure out how to Select All. I don't think I should have to justify it, but in case someone's wondering - it's useful if you want to search or parse an entire Terminal session using some other process (eg, grep), or edit it, or just persist it for example. Regardless of why, "Select All" is such a standard function it felt quite strange it wasn't suported out of the box.
- spartanatreyu 2y ago
  Select all seems a bit risky in a terminal because it could contain way more information than you'd expect. e.g. I want to `cat` a file to make sure i've got the right one, but I accidentally cat a full 1gb sql backup rather than the tiny 50 line script I was expecting. Sometime later, I try to select all, copy, switch application, paste for some reason but now I'm stuck waiting for 1gb to copy over Personally I'm a bit more cautious about copying from a terminal. Either way if that's what you really want to do, you can check the repo to see how other people scripted it into wezterm: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/2026 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/2026
javierhonduco 2y ago
Haven’t had the chance to play with WezTerm just yet but wanted to share that the author is an incredibly smart, friendly, and humble. Had the opportunity to work on a project together at work some years back and I can only aspire to be 1/10th as good of an engineer as him. A true hacker.
WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
I had a bit FOMO not using TMUX. But WezTerm and a handful of keybindings for creating tabs, panes, new windows and moving around solved that for me.
mianos 2y ago
It seems great but it's unusable to me as it does not support any port forwarding and my connections always go through a few jump boxes. The built in multiplexing is like magic.
nopcode 2y ago
Why do people mod their terminal prompt to display the current date/time? It feels like one of these "ricer" things like opening 9 terminals just to run cmatrix and screenfetch.
andrei_says_ 2y ago
I’ve been using western but unable to search my command line history or find the relevant documentation. Ideally fuzzy search of just the commands I’ve entered and not the full scroll history as some results take many hundreds of lines. Is there a wezterm community where I can ask this and similar questions?
theshrike79 2y ago
I really seem to like software that's configured with Lua. It looks nice just as a basic setup (key = value type stuff), but you can do really complex dynamic configurations with it (like the dark-mode config in the linked article). Hammerspoon is another, you can do so many things with it - I replicated most of Rectangle/Manget with Hammerspoon+Lua myself and now I can do the minor tweaks I couldn't do with the pre-packaged apps.
monzool 2y ago
I’ve have been using wezterm for a couple of years now i guess. I am super satisfied with it, and show my appreciation by being a github sponsor. One thing that I really appreciate is, that when I at $work have to use MacOS, I can bring my configuration with me and have the same experience as on my linux box. Other projects do provide that also of course. I did try Alacritty, but that was way to unstable. Kitty have a lot of good stuff going on as well, but it was indeed the lua configuration options that made me pick wezterm. I think the only things I’m missing from Konsole is the infinite scroll buffer and the regex search overlay (continuous search without entering a special copy/search mode)…
snapplebobapple 2y ago
serious question: why aren't you guys doing all the extra feature stuff in zellij and not having to care so much about what term you are using?

488 points by alexpls 2y ago

I have work to do! I won't drop everything right now to check it... Okay, maybe for just a few minutes.

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/colorschemes/ https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/colorschemes/ ^ There's a host of built-in color schemes.

enricozb 2y ago

One thing I was looking for just yesterday was a way to dump my terminal's (alacrity) scrollback - escape sequences and all - to stdout. I wanted to pipe it to my text editor to search. Alacrity doesn't seem to have this unfortunately, but wezterm does with get-text.

saurik 2y ago
Have you tried xterm? It takes a bit longer to configure, as its defaults are universally horrible, but I've found the result to be worth the effort. FWIW, it has this feature you are talking about as part of it's "print" functionality. I bound ctrl-shift-P to print-everything() and then set printerCommand to `xterm -class modal -e sh -c 'vim +"setlocal buftype=nofile" +"g/^$/d" +"normal G$" - <&3' 3<&` (which might be crazy; I didn't think through it for very long). You can use printAttributes to tell it to include the format escape sequences, though (personally) I have that turned off for this purpose (as I find it makes it more difficult to search in my editor; but, again: I didn't spend much time on the editor side of this arrangement).
- enricozb 2y ago
  Hmm I'll have to look into this. After some basic playing around with this feature it might be workable. In my head I had my editor taking over the current program in the terminal, and after exiting it would return to the previous program, but that involves some backgrounding and job manipulation that I haven't given too much thought. Thanks for the tip.

gtirloni 2y ago

The main feature for me is splitting panes. I used to that in tilix and got western working exactly the same (can't stand tmux , sorry). The Lua configuration is very intuitive as well. I do get some indirect crashes when Xwayland crashes, which is rare. I had to disable Wayland support in wezterm because the window decorations aren't great yet.

abhinavk 2y ago
Same. Panes and tabs are must in a modern terminal emulator. I like tmux but not on my workstation.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  I'm with you! tmux is pretty much a non-starter for me beyond a remote job manager. My window manager (Sway) already requires enough wild incantations. If any, I really appreciate simple integration in the terminal. A little more than 'foot' but not a lot. Tabs/panes, like you say. It gives some more granularity to the organization without a lot of new buttons to push. I've taken most of the Tilix defaults through several! Currently Kitty... though I may try WezTerm.

sodapopcan 2y ago

Nice write up, may try out WezTerm though I only just recently switched to Kitty and I don't like hopping around too often. Correction related to Kitty, though. It does not use either YAML or TOML, it has its own simple config DSL and is otherwise fully scriptable via Python.

mobilemidget 2y ago
same here, I just bookmarked it for now

replete 2y ago

iTerm's quake-style visor mode bound to a hotkey is too good to give up...

marliechiller 2y ago
This the the one feature keeping me from jumping. Its so handy!
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Often you hear it should be the desktop job to do this, but given most of them don't, it's moot.
- replete 2y ago
  I wish I could bind applications to slide out from left and right, I use slidepad on Mac which is a slide out web browser, and TotalFinder which has a visor feature for the bottom. Little things like this keep me on Mac to be honest
- rekoil 2y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but I want the feature. I have it in iTerm, and I don't in WezTerm. We can blame Apple if we want, but they are not going to implement this feature for us.
lkuty 2y ago
"quake-style visor mode" what is that feature? I am currently using iTerm2.
- replete 2y ago
  In Quake, the video game, a console would slide down from the top of the screen when you pressed tilde. Combined with splitting terminals its incredibly convenient to have 4 or 5 terminals toggle on a hotkey
eviks 2y ago
dont think you need to give it up, there is a description on how to do that in https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/1751 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/1751

rdtsc 2y ago

I like it too, and have switched from iTerm2 to WezTerm recently. I tried some others, but WezTerm has window splitting which I use quite a bit so settled on it. Lua config is nice, although I am a minimal config kind of a person, so only have a few settings in there. Yeah, iTerm2 has a lot of other fancy features, but I just rarely or never used them, so don't really feel like I miss anything.

replete 2y ago
ITerm has window splitting btw
- rdtsc 2y ago
  I know that’s why looked for something that also has it. Alacrity didn’t from what I could see.

throwaway1194 2y ago

Try it on Asahi next.

throwaway1194 2y ago
Why the downvote?

leblancfg 2y ago

Recently switched to WezTerm and I'm very happy. Was using kitty before that – loved the set up and simplicity coming from iTerm2. WezTerm is leaps and bounds better in terms of what comes out-of-the-box. My terminal config is short enough to sit all in one screen on my editor. After that, the terminal just... gets out of the way and I don't need to think about it. But the straw that broke my back with using kitty was, I'd end up encountering issues or trying to recreate some of iTerm2's features, only to end up time and again on kitty's maintainer's terse and dismissive comments. e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up.

adumer 2y ago
Interestingly enough, the article points out something I had the exact same terse and dismissive experience with kitty - following OS theme.
saurik 2y ago
Yeah: the kitty developer is definitely the sort who believes that he not only knows better than everyone else how to use a terminal, but that everyone else's opinions are fundamentally invalid. That his terminal fails to correctly render such stalwarts as the Linux "make menuconfig" UI and there are no settings to fix it as he doesn't believe in settings is, to me, telling. I then find reading his posts on issue trackers not just insulting, but even "activating" in a way that is really unhealthy, as it results in me feeling a need to "defend" some random bit of terminal usage with just as much vigor, lest he get away with making everyone else sound like THEY are crazy... it really isn't healthy. I can't know for sure--as we don't live in this reality--but I'd like to think that, even if he and I agreed on literally everything there is to do with terminals, that I'd still have the same mindset that I'd rather write my own terminal than ever use his.
- actinium226 2y ago
  I guess this is what people mean when they say a piece of software is "opinionated"?

colesantiago 2y ago

There are so many terminals out there. Curious what sort of features and other things you look for when looking or comparing terminals like WezTerm and the like? What are your deal breakers and must haves of a terminal emulator?

ishaanbahal 2y ago
For me, speed, simplicity in configuration, and no AI is more or less a good start. I moved from iTerm to Warp recently, before switching to wezterm, and the only reason i dropped Warp (despite signing in) was that it comes in your way a lot, the click to focus on blocks becomes a hindrance for me (I hardly care for the previous blocks), the constant reminders in Red to update and obviously the AI prompting, albeit to the side, they keep trying to find a way for me to use it, but I'd rather stick with CTRL+R or quick google search than write a coherent sentence explaining things to a LLM. I left iTerm because I couldn't configure it to my liking, although there are certainly ways to do it, i just couldn't. iTerm2 is certainly a good enough terminal, wezterm just somehow suits my needs better.

greazy 2y ago

I've been using wezterm for more than a year. The defaults are very good. I need to look into all the advanced features.

vladstudio 2y ago

Upvote! I tried Mac Terminal, iTerm2, Kitty, Warp, etc etc, and settled with WezTerm. Easy to configure, fast, looks nice. I created a theme for it too: https://tiniri.vlad.studio/ https://tiniri.vlad.studio/

pivo 2y ago
I like your light Vlad theme, installed! Thank you!
nop_slide 2y ago
This theme is very nice! Any way to get it into JetBrains editors?
- robotmachine 2y ago
  Seconded ^
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Beautiful theme!
kissgyorgy 2y ago
Very nice!
iamnotarobotman 2y ago
Also tried these terminals as well but stuck with Wezterm in the end and its one of my favourites. I happened to have stumbled upon here to compare those terminals on this site: https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ Looks pretty useful to me or anyone else that wants to compare terminals.
hosteur 2y ago
I just want to say that I love your color themes! Would love one for Konsole and Sublime Text.

maztaim 2y ago

I'm a long time tmux fan, but I've been dealing with odd issues related to mouse actions. This is somewhere in alacritty, *vim or tmux. So I futzed with all of them, tried different terminals, all while telling myself it couldn't be tmux. So I just ignored it for over a year. I finally went back and gave wezterm a serious try just a few weeks ago and I am very happy to have switched. The mouse issues I was seeing go away. Splitting panes and resizing lots of panes is fast and responsive. It's built in so copying from a vertical split pane doesn't include the other pane like in tmux. That doesn't make it perfect. Mouse themes are applied inconsistently as I use Gnome on Wayland. It also seems to be a problem when using neovim, but I can't prove it clearly enough to want to file a bug with anyone. Besides, everything I need to do still works and I rarely use the mouse unless I am copying random gobs of text. I am sticking with wezterm for the moment. I have no reason to leave it at this point and it helped me reduce the complexity of my stack a teeny bit.

bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
for tmux replacement, check out zellij for a modern take. https://zellij.dev/ https://zellij.dev/
- maztaim 2y ago
  Thanks for the link. I've tried this in the past. I feel no reason to try this with wezterm as what I need is already included.
hypnotist 2y ago
I use tmux daily. tried to like wezterm but issues with clipboard and resizing made look for another option. Very happy with Tilix now. https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ maybe less fancy/modern but absolutely rock solid every time. environment: fedora/wayland/gnome just throwing this out if anyone wants to test an alternative it out.

bdhcuidbebe 2y ago

Whats not to like of wezterm?? My favorite and often overlooked feature is that wezterm is fully cross os, so if you work like me in Linux, macOS and Windows, then you can just learn wezterm and be done. I even share large parts of my terminal config across os:es.

Barrin92 2y ago
that's where the language choices really matter I think. Lua as a programmable configuration language shines because it makes it quite easy to make environment specific changes. Also I think underrated side effect of Rust. A lot of the modern rust tooling has great cross platform support probably because there's a good abstraction layer between language and OS.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Isn’t that more just any language not C or C++? Go, Rust, Java, Python, etc all abstract away significant OS specifics. There are always going to be some thorny differences, but any modern language makes cross compatibility possible in a way that is more challenging for C.
  - blt 2y ago
    It's not just the language/library: build systems are also a big obstacle for x-platform GUI apps in C.
jasonjayr 2y ago
I used wezterm a long while after switching from urxvt. There was a GPU memory leak or something, becuase after opening a bunch of terminals, I found that Graphics in firefox started lagging and dragging. I switched to kitty (And Microsoft Terminal on windows), but I use tmux inside (apparently much to the authors annoyance). I should wezterm another look ...
- tjoff 2y ago
  I've had similar issues the last few months and have had to switch back to alacritty on every machine I own.

benreesman 2y ago

Hardware accelerated ligatures. QED.

steelbrain 2y ago

Going to echo some of the thoughts of sibling posters. I'd been an iTerm2 user since I first started using macOS nearly ten years ago. I had really started to feel it slow down lately. It hit the breaking point when I was cmd-tab-ing and found myself waiting for more than a second just for the terminal to appear. Looked around, evaluated a couple alternatives and none of them quite fit my taste. One terminal required an account/login to operate, which is a big no IMO, another was written in {Java,Type}Script so simple commands like `yes` would break it due to the async nature of streams in node.js. I really like WezTerm so far. It's quite fast, very much configurable and comes with the theme I was configuring with iTerm2 out of the box (OneDark (base16)). My only trouble with it was in the beginning when I had to add the configs for cmd-left and cmd-right in lua config, I really hoped they'd be in there with the defaults.

elashri 2y ago
> One terminal required an account/login to operate, which is a big no IMO, another was written in {Java,Type}Script so simple commands like `yes` would break it due to the async nature of streams in node.js. Let me guess, that's wrap and Tabby or extraterm respectively?

throwaway1194 2y ago

Does anyone know what the default colorscheme is on wezterm?

ishaanbahal 2y ago

Thank you for this write-up! Going to copy a couple of things to my config. TIL, Wezterm has a command palette. Wezterm with Zellij becomes amazing with how it just simply gets out of the way, even lets you remove window decorations entirely. I've heard Wezterm has a multiplexer too, but just haven't tried it.

Terretta 2y ago
> I've heard Wezterm has a multiplexer too, but just haven't tried it. You're in luck, the last half the post is about that.
- ishaanbahal 2y ago
  Did go through it, bookmarked for use, that's how I learned about the command palette, just hard to break the habit of using zellij, that too with tmux mode :D
  - zamalek 2y ago
    I migrated from zellij, here's a vaguely similar config to it: https://codeberg.org/jcdickinson/nix/src/branch/main/home/common/files/wezterm/wezterm.lua https://codeberg.org/jcdickinson/nix/src/branch/main/home/co...

globular-toast 2y ago

A problem I have when I see stuff like this with tabbed interfaces, splitting etc. is it's all at the wrong level of abstraction and compensating for a hopelessly deficient window manager. If you use a window manager like sway then you can layout tabs, splits etc. to your heart's content for any type of window you like. You don't need a terminal emulator to do this for you. Given that I do already use a window manager like sway, is there much else worthwhile compared to any other terminal emulator?

eredengrin 2y ago
Wezterm has built in ssh support where if you open a wezterm ssh window to a remote host and then open new tabs/splits within that window, the new tabs/splits are added as part of the existing ssh session automatically. It also allows you to host the session on the remote machine (kind of like tmux) and when you connect you get back all your previous tab/split organizations. From that perspective it can make sense to have the terminal own the layout organization.

binary132 2y ago

In my experience Wez has been shockingly responsive to GitHub issues and usually fixes things (if they’re actually wrong) within a day or two. I’ve only found one or two minor quibbles involving modifier keys over SSH and overall the functionality is basically perfect for my needs. Plus it’s nice and fast. (Former avid Alacritty user but needed better modifier support for remote emacs.)

bbkane 2y ago
Yes!! I opened an issue ( https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4917 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4917 ), and not only did he answer it and my side question, he merged the two PRs I made to fix it super quickly!
- yonatan8070 2y ago
  A bit of a tangent, 3 days ago I opened a small issue with RiMusic, not only did the maintainer reply within a few hours, they implemented the feature I requested and it is already in the F-Droid build running on my device
hrez 2y ago
I didn't have as positive experience. Granted I commented on a closed issue. In any case it was closed as "won't do" and my comment was ignored. I didn't feel like opening a new issue for the same that was already dismissed. https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4706 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4706
- naikrovek 2y ago
  Yeah Wez is limited by tmux behavior. If tmux breaks up one line into many, wezterm can’t undo that. Wes is right about wezterm domains though. The native domains feature and pane support I think will meet the needs of most.
  - hrez 2y ago
    It's the same with no tmux. And it's fine with other terminals. See my comment in the issue.

xrisk 2y ago

You can dump iterm2s config into a file and sync it to other machines. Granted it’s not meant to be edited directly but rather via the GUI, but yeah it’s possible to persist it if you want.

kamikaz1k 2y ago
Every time I’ve tried to do that, it doesn’t carry over. Does it support all the configurations?

rob74 2y ago

I originally installed WezTerm because I switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu and wanted some of the features of Konsole (infinite scrollback, searching the scrollback) without actually installing Konsole (I know you can install it under Gnome too, but it just felt... wrong). And yes, it instantly grew on me, although (as I can see from this article) I have barely scratched the surface of its configurability. My only complaint is that its many features are not really discoverable. Sure, the documentation is really good, and the author is very engaged and helpful, but... one example: I looked up how to select large blocks of text using just the keyboard, I did it once, said to myself "I have to remember this!", then promptly forgot it and now I'm back to selecting text with the mouse like an absolute noob because all in all for the few times I do this it's faster than googling that documentation page again... (in case you're wondering, the page I mean is https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/copymode.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/copymode.html, not https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html, which sounds like what I was looking for, but is something completely different - also very handy and a great idea, but not what I was after)

bbkane 2y ago
I keep my Wezterm config in a dotfiles repo and I keep notes like this in the README ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm ), precisely to find them easily later!
barnabee 2y ago
Quickselect mode is amazing though! It's useful out of the box but the superpower is that you can customise the regexes it matches. I've added one that finds all the filenames output by 'eza --icons' (\p{Co} matches the icon) so I can instantly type (by using shift+the quickselect letters) any filename after doing an ls (aliased to eza).
ajaxnet 2y ago
A side question, why switching from Kubuntu ? Because I'm thinking to install it.
monzool 2y ago

alberth 2y ago

OT: I'm most excited by Ghostty (created by the founder of HashiCorp). https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh

lytedev 2y ago
What are you excited about concerning Ghostty? I revisit the project every once in a while, because I think Zig has a wonderful and bright future, but I don't think I could ever use a terminal emulator that isn't completely open-source. WezTerm has an _enormous_ leg up over Ghostty in this regard IMO.
- alberth 2y ago
  > Ghostty is still a private project. I plan to open source it one day and share it with more people but for now this is a private personal project. https://mitchellh.com/ghostty https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
- matricaria 2y ago
  Ghostty will be open source once it is stable enough.
  - ayhanfuat 2y ago
    Public beta is planned for this year.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
matricaria 2y ago
I love Ghostty. On my old MacBook, it was by far the fastest terminal emulator (yes, I tried all of them, also WezTerm and Alacritty). Now on my new Mac it is still the most beautiful terminal emulator.
lawn 2y ago
It feels like I've been waiting for an invite a long time now. I'm eager to try it out. Then again, I should probably try WezTerm first.

FL33TW00D 2y ago

WezTerm is just so much faster than iTerm2, wish I had switched sooner! Video demonstrating the speedup: https://x.com/fleetwood___/status/1807772624518316495 https://x.com/fleetwood___/status/1807772624518316495

abhinavk 2y ago
Is it better in typing latency though?
- hughesjj 2y ago
  ..you have noticable latency when you type? I'm genuinely sorry, that would infuriate me. Personally I don't notice any typing latency in wezterm. I have p10k as a zsh theme and not really any 'plugins' beyond git for the terminal and use neovim+ also pretty much just got and CoC for an editor. I don't notice any latency when typing and, while not instant, still sub 200ms startup latency.
  - fmajid 2y ago
    Dan Luu had studied terminal input latency: https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ iTerm2 was shockingly bad, for instance, at 44ms vs 6ms for Apple's default Terminal.app. That right there is a deal-killer as far as I am concerned.
    - hughesjj 2y ago
      Wow, and that's before plugins. I remember being so frustrated with a Mac because of the animations. It would take like a full half second to maximize etc. I tried disabling them but then it would just do a cross fade or something and still be unresponsive when I tried to type/click on the focused window. That plus cmd+space doing nbsp and Ruby (required by our IaC framework at the time) treating such differently than other whitespace was the end of my experiment, back to Linux lol (I have no problems with Mac users and get the love for them, but I definitely prefer Ubuntu)
- 2y ago

adem 2y ago

I tried WezTerm on Windows because I was looking for a terminal with ligature support and lower input latency than Windows Terminal. Unfortunately, it still had higher input latency than cmd.exe. The only terminal with ligature support that comes close in terms of input latency is contour (https://contour-terminal.org/ https://contour-terminal.org/).

eviks 2y ago
did you measure latency? Curious as to how big the difference is
- adem 2y ago
  I can't provide you with numbers but back when I used Windows on my work machine, I recorded my screen + microphone input using OBS to compare they recorded keystroke sound and appearance of the character on my screen. I was able to confirm my suspicion in that WezTerm yielded higher input latency. This was especially noticeable when using helix inside of WSL - movement in normal mode would always sort of lag behind the keystrokes. EDIT: Just installed in on my Mac and here, I can't notice any difference between kitty (my current input latency baseline) and WezTerm. Good stuff! Not sure how Windows fares nowadays, though.
  - wongogue 2y ago
    I don’t know if it’s my setup or just Windows quirks but even Alacritty feels slower than Windows Terminal. You can also use Is It Snappy? from the App Store to test typing latency. It was made by Chad Austin who had problems similar to us. https://chadaustin.me/2017/04/announcing-is-it-snappy/ https://chadaustin.me/2017/04/announcing-is-it-snappy/

bloopernova 2y ago

Oh, very cool that it uses Lua for its configuration. That opens up a massive potential for new behaviours and customization. Emacs uses Lisp in a similar way. What other applications use a programming language for their configuration?

awesomelvin 2y ago
Not sure if it counts but the suckless project (e.g. st or dwm) use C (its source code) as config :)
lawn 2y ago
Neovim is the obvious example here, also relying on Lua. Neovim of course also supports Vimscript, although writing anything more complex is much nicer in Lua.
bbkane 2y ago
NeoVim also uses Lua and I think nginx does too.
radlad 2y ago
awesome-wm!
kragen 2y ago
probably the most popular instances of this approach are firefox, chromium, and safari. the unix shell, godot, unity, unreal engine, truetype, and postscript are probably also worth a mention
kccqzy 2y ago
XMonad (a window manager) uses Haskell.

weinzierl 2y ago

So many comments from people coming from iTerm. What do you have in your WezTerm config to make it more like iTerm?

spartanatreyu 2y ago
As a fellow iterm2 refuge, here's my config: https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/fe6d045c3113f27acaa509c3fdc6b736 https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/fe6d045c3113f27acaa509... I added back the familiar option/cmd + arrow key navigation and cmd + click hyperlink behaviour. There's also some tweaking to make it more similar to iterm's default behaviours (e.g. don't hide the mouse when you start typing). And finally some personal visual tweaks which you can throw out and replace with your own.

linsomniac 2y ago

I've been using wezterm for around a year, and sponsoring Wez on github, and it's been a fantastic terminal and he's a great developer. One of the things I love most about it, which the article mentions it is not going into, is the quick copy and other copy modes. I use them All. The. Time. C-S-Space and type the letters that appear next to the item you want to copy. One big use case I have is: mosh+tmux-like functionality from my macos laptop to my work Linux machine. I always have a session running so I can do things on my work machine from my Mac. It gives a re-connectable session plus panes and tabs so I can do work when I'm away from my desk. It's top notch.

ursuscamp 2y ago
One really cool feature of the quick copy mode is that if you do the uppercase version of the letters it will automatically paste the value back into the terminal prompt.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  Agreed, I use that for probably 80% of my copies. Also works in the regular select, if you "Y" instead of "y" it yanks and pastes.
Graziano_M 2y ago
Wow TIL about that QuickSelect. I will be using that a lot.

kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago

[dead]

eviks 2y ago

> My favourite WezTerm feature is its use of Lua for defining config. That's indeed one of its best features (despite the warts of the language) as you're not as limited in what you can do vs. the data serialization alternative

kelsey98765431 2y ago

I will literally switch OS to anything that can implement iTerm2's tmux integration.

jonhohle 2y ago
I only use tmux on remote machines (because Terminal has all of the features I want and don’t need session management locally). Does anything integrate with remote tmux? It would be great to get native tabs for remote tmux windows.
- kelsey98765431 2y ago
  Yes, i literally sometimes need to manage dozens of machines at once, all with various tmux sessions monitoring tasks etc. being able to use the same keybinds for split pane, move between pane, smooth scrolling WITHOUT entering tmux curses based scrolling mode, and local buffering... number one reason i main macos after using linux for decades. EDIT: the command is `tmux -uCC a` to connect to a tmux session, works locally and works over ssh. spawn the tmux session normally, disconnect, then connect via command mode for best results. you can still spawn a new one with just `tmux -uCC` but i have found i can get some issues when i spawn it in command mode vs attach in command mode.
- galkk 2y ago
  Iterm2, as parent mentioned. Run tmux -CC on your remote server in your iterm2 and you’ll get native windows for tmux panels
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    Nice. I had no idea!
  - epiccoleman 2y ago
    I can't believe I'm just learning about this today!
E39M5S62 2y ago

dmd 2y ago

The one thing that keeps me on iTerm2 is Edit->Selection Respects Soft Boundaries. "When enabled, vertical lines of pipe characters | will be interpreted as pane dividers (as in vim or emacs) and selection will wrap at them." (For me, it's selecting text in irc.) https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/596 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/596

jph 2y ago
Yes 100%. This is a superb UI/UX feature once you see it in action.
nixosbestos 2y ago
Meanwhile zellij just supports this natively if your terminal supports the right OSC thingy. Which it does if you're in this thread. edit: rough, my bad. missed the via "in irc" part.
- dmd 2y ago
  Reread my comment.
ledauphin 2y ago
i've been using iterm for... years and had never noticed this setting. Which is a killer feature for my use of emacs. thanks!
dmd 2y ago
(self-reply) This is basically the Microsoft Word bloat problem. NOBODY needs all the features, but everyone has 10 niche features they want, and nobody wants the same 10. So to get 10 niche features, you accept bloat.
yonatan8070 2y ago
That sounds incredible, is there any terminal that supports it on Linux?

zoidb 2y ago

Nice to see wezterm on the frontpage! For anyone giving it try beware that link detection doesn't work super well for links containing a `)` character which is something you run into frequently on markdown documents. More info in https://github.com/wez/wezterm/pull/4212 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/pull/4212 which has a workaround.

roydivision 2y ago

I recently changed from Alacritty to WezTerm due to bugs in the former and I don't have any complaints so far. It is part of my daily professional workflow, works well with Tmux, under WSL. Great piece of software.

robinsonrc 2y ago
I went in the other direction and use Zellij for multiplexing. It works well for me, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the Ghostty public beta to see how that compares. Great to have all these good options.
CoolCold 2y ago
for myself, I couldn't find good reasons to keep using WezTerm vs Windows Terminal - not saying WezTerm is not capable terminal, of course.

skim 2y ago

Wez is coming out with a book too on systems programming in Rust. https://leanpub.com/sysprog https://leanpub.com/sysprog

test1235 2y ago

I've been using wezterm on windows for a while and still not managed to work out how to close a split pane. Is this a bug?

andrewfromx 2y ago

Things I noticed using it: != goes to weird ≠ utf8 char. I like != better! Command-K clears the scroll back but NOT the screen. Updates: config.harfbuzz_features = {"calt=0", "clig=0", "liga=0"} Command-L

kokada 2y ago

I also recently switched to WezTerm because it is the only terminal that seems to work cross-platform that is also well supported in Nix/nixpkgs. Before I was using Kitty in NixOS and iTerm2 in macOS, but having one configuration for both OS is good. P.S.: I am temporary back to Kitty in NixOS because I recently switched from Sway to Hyprland and the current release of WezTerm seems to be having some issues in Hyprland. But will switch back once this issue is solved, I know it is fixed in the main branch for example, but I would prefer to use nixpkgs cache instead of building it from source.

Macha 2y ago
Kitty works on macOS too?
- kokada 2y ago
  Yes, but when I did the migration Kitty wasn't supported in macOS in nixpkgs (i.e.: nobody did the package integration). Now looking at the package it looks like it should work, but I now think WezTerm being superior in at least a few things (e.g.: the Lua configuration file is definitely nice).

KingOfCoders 2y ago

Would like to switch from Tabby on Windows to WezTerm, but would wish the Win installer would setup WSL2 so it just works. For now I don't want to get into learning a Lua config.

nusl 2y ago
Windows' terminal has integration directly with WSL2; https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

vijucat 2y ago

If I'm fiddling with the terminal or the font, I know it's because I'm procrastinating. I've trained myself to quickly recognize such side-quests and feel a quick punch of hormonal urgency, which helps me get back to work (with mintty and Consolas). You don't need the bells and whistles.

qweqwe14 2y ago
This, unironically, is entirely correct. Some people spend way too much time configuring stuff that doesn't matter. "If you've never spent hours ricing your OS, you have no heart. If you still do, you have no brain."
pmarreck 2y ago
That's correct if it's always or very often your M.O., but if you rarely mess with it? How about if you spend some time fixing any annoyances that have accrued over time thanks to "involuntary unpaid vacation time"? For example, I recently reduced my terminal startup time to 1/3 what it was by putting in some optimizations. I'll be able to benefit from that for basically forever. ... Ah, you develop on Windows? This tracks, then... All productivity, no aesthetics >..<
- vijucat 2y ago
  As an aside, I'm surprised how Apple fans think they're the one with the aesthetics advantage when their Lord and Master allowed them to change the color of their menu bar in...2023? :)
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    That's why I'm a NixOS guy now. Mostly. ;) The main thing holding me back is the Apple ecosystem integration with my other iOS devices.
    - vijucat 2y ago
      That's hardcore. I admire people who work on Linux (I just use WSL 2 Ubuntu on Windows). Apparently, NixOS has it's fans! See: https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/14clrjh/how_is_nixos_not_the_most_popular_distro/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/14clrjh/how_is_nixos...

alskdj21 2y ago

As a neovim user, wezterm's lua config was a welcome surprise. Imo, its best feature is its command palette (Shift+Ctrl+P). Tremendously helps when you're just getting started. It has also a superb font-related configurations. I do hope I could map specific Unicode codepoints to a particular font, as is the case with kitty. In terms of use-case, I just disable all its keybindings and use it as a tmux terminal. I admit I didn't look for solutions, but I just can't go away from tmux's session restoration capabilities.

selectnull 2y ago

Like a few people in this thread, I was a decade long user of iTerm2. Can't really remember what was the reason to research other terminals, but I did and among those I tried, WezTerm was the clear winner. I vaguely remember my main requirement was being able to configure CMD+D and CMD+SHIFT+D as split panes vertically and horizontally as I wasn't willing to retrain my fingers to learn new keystrokes for that. Within a version of two after I switched (back then, those were weeks or less apart), all my complaints were resolved and I never looked back. My config is fairly minimal, but perfect for my needs. What else can one want?

anothername12 2y ago

What are you all doing that requires such fine grain selection of a terminal? I spend a lot of time in a terminal and just use whatever’s there. Terminal.app or gnome-terminal. Before that it was xterm. Perhaps the only customization is modifier key on Mac as meta.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kccqzy 2y ago

At a previous employer (Google) I really enjoyed using iTerm2, especially its tmux integration (`tmux -CC attach`) and shell integration (the terminal being aware of shell prompts and shell commands and outputs so it can do something intelligent). After switching employers I no longer have a Mac to run iTerm2 in. So I decided to simply reduce the number of apps I require by running my terminal inside Emacs. The emacs-libvterm project is excellent. These days I no longer need a terminal emulator app.

terraplura 2y ago

Been a long time user of Alacritty but recently switched to WezTerm. Set up was super quick and having graduated control over opacity and blur was brilliant. Also love that it supports Font Ligatures. Btw one gotcha on macOS during setup is that the left Option/Alt key does not emit the usual special character mappings, but the right Option key does. You can configure that too! Cheers Wez!

nebben64 2y ago
Thanks for sharing! Just curious, what made you switch from Alacrity? (I was also debating it vs. WezTerm)
- terraplura 2y ago
  Apart from the granular blur control. It was mainly the ligatures support, Alacritty’s developer doesn’t seem too keen on it. And it seems to be the only terminal that renders the ANSI blinking escape code properly (although I don’t think it distinguishes rapid and slow blink). I think it’s a cool feature! Unlike OP, I hardly use WezTerms features. I have hidden the tabs away and just use the old vim+tmux combo. So my config is just 25 lines. There was no weird colour interaction issue that alacrity+vim+tmux had (and there is a famous gist for). All which is to say I didn’t have to dive deep to migrate.
  - nebben64 2y ago
    makes sense, thank you for the insight :)

theusus 2y ago

Even though Wezterm has lots of options but it's slow compared to Kitty and maybe even Windows terminal

Ringz 2y ago
Yep. Tried Wez and switched back to Kitty because it’s much faster.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  on which platform?
  - Ringz 2y ago
    Windows. Didn’t test it on my MacBook M1. Both running nvim with the same config.
  - benfrain 2y ago
    macOS for me. Zipping up and down a buffer is noticeably faster (drawing/render wise) in the latest Kitty compared to WezTerm. Using 2019 Intel MBP

WD-42 2y ago

It’s a great terminal but still a bit warty on Linux/wayland. Unfortunately Wez is on OSX, I assume.

9front 2y ago
WezTerm is available for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD also. See https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/installation.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/installation.html

dgacmu 2y ago

Ah, rats. It looks nice but to save others a bit of searching, if broadcasting to multiple panes is a requirement for you (something I use often in iterm2), it's not yet supported and not planned for support: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/2658 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/2658

eredengrin 2y ago
Wez left the issue open and said "I personally have no plans to implement this any time soon.", so I have to imagine he's open to PRs. He just has other things to spend his own time on.

eigenvalue 2y ago

I'm looking forward to the eventual release of the new terminal that Mitchell Hashimoto has been working on for fun for a few year, Ghostty. From what he has shared online so far, it looks really awesome and well designed.

auditor_3d 2y ago

I have tried so many I can't count. I have settled on one that seems to be not as well known but should be. Black Box Terminal. It checks all kinds of great boxes for me, I love it. https://github.com/yonasBSD/blackbox-terminal https://github.com/yonasBSD/blackbox-terminal

ivanjermakov 2y ago
What "great boxes" do you have that more popular terminal emulators are missing?

jpeeler 2y ago

Can lazy internet help me replicate kitty's word selection (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/) in WezTerm? I believe one would just have to adjust the config for "quick select": https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/quick_select_patterns.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/quick_selec...

myst 2y ago

Am I a rare one being happy with Terminal.app?

abathur 2y ago
I'm pretty happy with it. I try alts when they come up since I might like to use the same thing on macOS and Linux, but I've yet to try one that both has the right features and doesn't feel sluggish.
robinsonrc 2y ago
I was until I started needing things like true colour support and was forced into trying other options. But if you haven’t noticed anything missing or not working with software that you use then Terminal.app is a fine choice
Myrmornis 2y ago
It doesn’t support terminal hyperlinks, which are produced by many tools nowadays (rg, fd, ls, delta).
- myst 2y ago
  I have no idea what you are talking about.
  - Myrmornis 2y ago
    Ah, OK. Basically many terminal emulators allow you to create text that is clickable, with the click going to an arbitrary URL. That could be a URL on the internet, but there are more interesting possibilities: e.g. you click on a line number in your terminal and it opens in your editor / IDE at that line number. The standard link that started it is https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3c..., but if you do internet searches for terms like `terminal hyperlinks ripgrep` or `terminal hyperlinks ls` or `terminal hyperlinks delta` you'll find more.

pmarreck 2y ago

Nice! I've been using Wezterm for a couple years. I use the Embark color theme, which I don't see represented on the wezterm themes page: https://github.com/dmshvetsov/wezterm-embark-theme https://github.com/dmshvetsov/wezterm-embark-theme I also like a slowly-blinking block cursor, a specific font, ligatures etc. Feel free to raid my config: https://github.com/pmarreck/dotconfig/blob/yolo/wezterm/wezterm.lua https://github.com/pmarreck/dotconfig/blob/yolo/wezterm/wezt... I love that I can use the same config on macOS and Linux as I use both machines often.

core_dumped 2y ago

I’m glad WezTerm is getting the attention it deserves. I just wish he’d change the icon though… it needs a facelift!

michael_michael 2y ago
Yeah. I wish subtle design cues didn't turn folks off from useful software. That said, when I was test driving terminals a few months ago, I saw WezTerm and just skipped it because the main image shows the opacity-enabled terminal with a Cyberpunk image in the background, and that just seemed…amateurish? Dunno. This article is convincing me to give it a second look.
ObscureMind 2y ago
https://github.com/mikker/wezterm-icon https://github.com/mikker/wezterm-icon

junon 2y ago

Big Wezterm fanboy here.

tracker1 2y ago

I'll need to look at it again. Mostly been using Tabby lately, which I like aspects of, but it can be sluggish. I really like the new Microsoft Terminal for Windows, but it's Windows only, unfortunately and I mostly use Linux and Mac. I looked at WezTerm a long while ago, didn't even realize I'd already had it starred. Will try it out again soon. It's just another one of those things, that I prefer to use the same applications (if I can) on all the platforms I use.

el_memorioso 2y ago

I used WezTerm for a while and loved it, but then I discovered it had some strange interactions with other programs that use the GPU or OpenGL. In my case, when running WezTerm, the robotics simulation tool Gazebo Classic [0] would only launch properly 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. The rest of the time the simulation appeared to start, but no display ever came up and the program eventually segfalted. I thought this was a Gazebo problem, since it is a bit touchy, but switching to another GPU-accelerated terminal like Kitty or Alacritty solved the problem. I guess the lesson being, if your GL program is misbehaving when launching from WezTerm, try another terminal to see if that doesn't solve the problem. [0] https://classic.gazebosim.org/ https://classic.gazebosim.org/

aftbit 2y ago

I really _want_ to like WezTerm but the font rendering just looks bad compared to Alacritty. I understand that this is a very personal feeling and plenty of people like the WezTerm way better... but not me. The author is not interested in trying to fix this issue, which is totally fine, as they point out font rendering is very subjective, but I'm also not willing to use a terminal that looks worse, even though I like many other things about it better. https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/5331 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/5331

hughesjj 2y ago
Oh man, fonts are fun. Ironically I moved off of alacrity and on to wezterm for font rendering reasons (p10k+patched nerd fonts), but that was pre pandemic
- taejavu 2y ago
  I’m using patched nerd fonts seemingly without issue on alacritty, were your problems specifically with p10k?
taejavu 2y ago
Oh wow I was expecting it to be slightly worse, like the subpixel rendering wasn’t quite right. But that is _bad_, to the extent it looks like a totally different font. Dealbreaker.
duskwuff 2y ago
I gave WezTerm a spin and it had some showstopper bugs rendering my preferred font (including a vertical offset on "b" to the extent it looks like "h"). Something's definitely not right here.
spartanatreyu 2y ago
I'd probably try a few fonts first just to see if it's an issue with rendering, or if the font itself is problematic since sometimes it's the font's fault itself when it's being used in a different environment. (font internals are a crazy rabbit hole to dive down) Besides, if you're trying another terminal it's also a great excuse to try other things too! I'm a fan of tools like these where you compare a series of option pairs (in this case font pairs) in succession until it spits out your most preferred option: https://www.codingfont.com/ https://www.codingfont.com/

tambourine_man 2y ago

This looks very interesting. I’ll have to look at it closer later. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html Thanks for posting

alexcaza 2y ago

As a fellow iTerm2 to Wezterm convert this hit home. There’s loads of useful stuff in here, too! Thanks for the write up. I particularly like the projects setup. I built Weztermocil to achieve something similar that uses itermocil’s configs since that’s what we use at work. https://github.com/alexcaza/weztermocil https://github.com/alexcaza/weztermocil

robxorb 2y ago

Just tried it. I liked how easy it was to set up colours/fonts etc, using the config file. But I hit a snag. On macOS, it's standard that in any text window, to select everything for copying, you hit Command-a. But Command-a in wezterm just printed an "a" character. What? I spent a while looking in the docs and issues, but couldn't figure out how to Select All. I don't think I should have to justify it, but in case someone's wondering - it's useful if you want to search or parse an entire Terminal session using some other process (eg, grep), or edit it, or just persist it for example. Regardless of why, "Select All" is such a standard function it felt quite strange it wasn't suported out of the box.

spartanatreyu 2y ago
Select all seems a bit risky in a terminal because it could contain way more information than you'd expect. e.g. I want to `cat` a file to make sure i've got the right one, but I accidentally cat a full 1gb sql backup rather than the tiny 50 line script I was expecting. Sometime later, I try to select all, copy, switch application, paste for some reason but now I'm stuck waiting for 1gb to copy over Personally I'm a bit more cautious about copying from a terminal. Either way if that's what you really want to do, you can check the repo to see how other people scripted it into wezterm: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/2026 https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/2026

javierhonduco 2y ago

Haven’t had the chance to play with WezTerm just yet but wanted to share that the author is an incredibly smart, friendly, and humble. Had the opportunity to work on a project together at work some years back and I can only aspire to be 1/10th as good of an engineer as him. A true hacker.

WuxiFingerHold 2y ago

I had a bit FOMO not using TMUX. But WezTerm and a handful of keybindings for creating tabs, panes, new windows and moving around solved that for me.

mianos 2y ago

It seems great but it's unusable to me as it does not support any port forwarding and my connections always go through a few jump boxes. The built in multiplexing is like magic.

nopcode 2y ago

Why do people mod their terminal prompt to display the current date/time? It feels like one of these "ricer" things like opening 9 terminals just to run cmatrix and screenfetch.

andrei_says_ 2y ago

I’ve been using western but unable to search my command line history or find the relevant documentation. Ideally fuzzy search of just the commands I’ve entered and not the full scroll history as some results take many hundreds of lines. Is there a wezterm community where I can ask this and similar questions?

theshrike79 2y ago

I really seem to like software that's configured with Lua. It looks nice just as a basic setup (key = value type stuff), but you can do really complex dynamic configurations with it (like the dark-mode config in the linked article). Hammerspoon is another, you can do so many things with it - I replicated most of Rectangle/Manget with Hammerspoon+Lua myself and now I can do the minor tweaks I couldn't do with the pre-packaged apps.

monzool 2y ago

I’ve have been using wezterm for a couple of years now i guess. I am super satisfied with it, and show my appreciation by being a github sponsor. One thing that I really appreciate is, that when I at $work have to use MacOS, I can bring my configuration with me and have the same experience as on my linux box. Other projects do provide that also of course. I did try Alacritty, but that was way to unstable. Kitty have a lot of good stuff going on as well, but it was indeed the lua configuration options that made me pick wezterm. I think the only things I’m missing from Konsole is the infinite scroll buffer and the regex search overlay (continuous search without entering a special copy/search mode)…

snapplebobapple 2y ago

serious question: why aren't you guys doing all the extra feature stuff in zellij and not having to care so much about what term you are using?