I’ll start: After switching to Neovide from the terminal for Neovim, I got really hooked on the animated cursor and smooth scrolling (links to Neovide’s features page). It wasn’t until 2 months ago when the earlier was added to Kitty. I did so much overthinking about which terminal to use, and realized that I wouldn’t (and don’t) use most of the features provided by ones like iTerm and Kitty, though I picked the later. I was pleasantly surprised to see it added, even if it could use more work to make long smooth cursor animations like Neovide. The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can’t believe there are no modern terminals with it.
(Somewhat) Side note: At this point many users realized that Ghostty got over-hyped, here is Mitchell Hashimoto’s (dev of Ghostty) thoughts:
https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 – Mitchell HashimotoI didn’t anticipate the hype. Some people think I am lying when I say this. I’m not. I’m not so naive to think that private betas and exclusive access don’t generate hype in principle. But I didn’t think many people at all would be interested in a terminal emulator. I thought I was building boring software for a niche audience. No hype! But I was wrong, and the consequences were real. People were frustrated that they couldn’t get in. People felt left out. People felt like I was being fake to generate hype. The waitlist grew larger than I was comfortable allowing in (given my prior stated priorities). I’m sorry about that. All I can say is that I didn’t intend for this to happen. I ramped up beta invites to try to get as many people in as I felt comfortable with (well, a bit beyond that). We ended the beta at around 5,000 users in a Discord of 28,000 at the time. Not quite the percentage of access I wanted for people but more than I could handle.
…One more negative aspect of the hype is the expectation of Ghostty being revolutionary. It is and it isn’t. Ghostty has different goals and tradeoffs than other terminals. For those looking for those properties, Ghostty is a breath of fresh air and does things that no other terminal does. But for others, it’s just a terminal. And that’s okay. I hope you find a terminal that works for you and I don’t claim that Ghostty is the end all be all of terminals.
I dunno, they pretty much all work the same for me.
A jupyter-notebook like approach, in which commands and history are kept in previous boxes and show outputs in limited boxes and we stop limiting ourselves to pretending we’re still using teletypes but maintain the power pipes bring to unix. Also, all boxes are given filenames in a virtual fs that makes it easy to reference them or their output and treat them like a file, erasing the need to rerun a command to run something on its output because you forgot to save it.
Interesting, I would absolutely hate using something like that for actual use but it does seem like it could be useful for like demonstrations and documentation
This. Well put.
The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can’t believe there are no modern terminals with it.
Seconded on both counts.
My terminal doesn’t “scroll” at all. Page up and down is all I need. I also don’t smooth scroll in my browser usually. Does it add anything? Isn’t smooth scrolling just worse actually (just like any other animation ever)?. The sooner the screen stops moving the sooner your eyes can lock on, focus and read. I never payed attention to it but you say it’s not widely supported, and that kinda makes sense to me. I can’t think of any reason to have it. I do lots of things in the terminal, I don’t even have a file manager. Smooth scrolling would make me slower and I would go crazy. Also you could scroll and end up with half a line visible on the top or bottom, which is just kinda weird and wasting space.
The sooner the screen stops moving the sooner your eyes can lock on, focus and read.
On the other hand, if I’m reading through a command’s output and searching for something, abrupt movement of the contents make me lose track of where I am and it costs more time to reorient myself than the smooth scrolling animation would take to play out. More importantly (to me), it takes less mental effort as well. It’s just a more comfortable experience. Ever since I switched to neovide instead of plain nvim I find myself enjoying long coding sessions much more.
It sounds like you just might not be negatively affected by the abrupt movement as much as some of us are. You might now get why we care about smooth scrolling because it happens to not do anything for you. That’s fine and a good implementation would allow the user to toggle it on/off based on their needs.
Also you could scroll and end up with half a line visible on the top or bottom, which is just kinda weird and wasting space.
No, I imagine that’s not the way most terminal emulators would implement it. Scrolling would still be done in whole lines, it would just animate smoothly towards the final position rather than jump instantly to it. You would not be able to end up on a half-line or something.
Try reading an entire epub book in scroll mode and you’ll see the use case.
Unified system for popping tabs in and out as windows like a browser (mixed support).
Session handler for tying tabs into screen or tmux (you can do this by yourself, but it’s only useful sometimes).
A shell where I can just copy and paste like a normal damn text editor (or using readline bindings).
How is me doing
Ctrl+[in tmux and then arrow keys to get to the line I want to copy, and thenCtrl+Spaceand thenAlt-w, and thenqmy best bet at this?I usually just reach for the mouse and do
Ctrl+Shift+Cinstead, but goddamn do I wish I didn’t have to.Also, what the fuck tmux - how is rolling the mouse bound to anything that anyone would want? And why do you inherit the shell you spawned from? Why not spawn as a new shell like everyone expects you to. Asshole utility.
I don’t want all these fancy schmancy features. I’m very happy with foot in its current form. The only additional feature I would like is ligature support, but otherwise foot already has the features I want in a terminal emulator, and more that are optional for me (e.g. sixel support; although I do use sixels for my lf previewer, it is not necessary for me). I also don’t want my terminal emulator to have tiling, because rivertile does that for me, or whatever your window tiler is. Same for tabs. You can use i3 tabs, sway tabs, Hyprland groups, etc instead of having tabs in your terminal emulator.
Good touch support. Using termux has more then sold me on it, While many terms to support touch, I do often come across some that don’t. Otherwise i’m a simple man, be fast enough, work with one of the “major” image specs like sixel or whatever and do the basics and im set.
- Distrobox, podman container support (listing, entering shell, color)
- Never open new windows
- Not GTK
- Normal name
- Not shady or proprietary
Otherwise Konsole, Cosmic-Term or “ptyxis” are both fine
I’d be happy as a clam in Konsole with a container aware prompt, a non-buggy SSH manager that replicated across machines, and a code snippets sidebar that did the same.
Distrobox/Podman support would be nice.
There are custom commands, but built in support with a menu would be nice.
i’d like to see more built in commands along the same vein as bash added features to sh.
i know it’s possible to install something through your package manager; add it to your shell config; and simply source your environment; but there’s something to be said about installing a single terminal emulator and having everything ready the go.
the closest thing i found to this a commercial terminal emulator named zoc and i don’t see a reason why it’s not already a foss thing.
Honestly, the only thing of Bash i miss sometimes in POSIX sh is arrays.
I always find status to be cumbersome in bash; I marvel at anyone who can work w them effectively lol
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