Terminal emulator alternative

[MadLittleMods]

Currently using xfce4-terminal which came with my Manjaro/XFCE install but it's lacking features. Basically, I'm just used to some niceties from iTerm2 on macOS.

Lacking features:

• Ctrl + Shift + f find dialog does not show number of occurrences and highlight the position in the scrollbar
  • Features tracked in the xfce4-terminal repo by https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-terminal/-/issues/241 and https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-terminal/-/issues/242
  • Bonus points for being able to search only in the output of the previous command
• Be able to jump up and down to previous commands/prompts
  • With iTerm2, I could do this with Cmd + Shift + arrow up/down after installing the shell integration (https://stackoverflow.com/a/56420163/796832). Basically what it does it add a special mark to your shell prompt and you can jump from mark to mark.
• Persistently highlight matching text in the terminal
  • In iTerm2, I could achieve this with a trigger to highlight text, https://stackoverflow.com/a/41468739/796832
  • Captured output
    • "When you build a big project, you used to have to pore over its output to find warnings and errors. No more! With the captured output feature, iTerm2 finds those messages (based on regular expressions you define) and shows them in the toolbelt.", https://iterm2.com/documentation-captured-output.html
    • I didn't even know this was a feature in iTerm2 but is exactly what I've been wanting forever and basically what I was jankily trying to achieve with the persistent highlights

Some stuff from https://www.warp.dev/ also looks cool but haven't tried it.

Potential solutions

Some recommendations: https://askubuntu.com/a/1079589/196148

Interesting options:

• https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby
• https://github.com/wez/wezterm (works pretty well and is what I have been using)
• https://github.com/KDE/konsole (seems decent)
• https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix (seems decent)
  • Make sure to go to Preferences -> Appearance -> Use tabs instead of sidebar

Possible options:

• https://github.com/gnome-terminator/terminator (seemed ok but weird looking out of the box)

Not viable:

• https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty (no tabs)
• https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty (maybe, but couldn't figure out how to search out of the box and dropped it quick)

Solution

Use Ghostty

TODO: Figure out which shell to use -> #35

[MadLittleMods]

Probably will switch to Ghostty when that becomes generally available

• https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
• Ghostty: A New Terminal Emulator Written in Zig - Mitchell Hashimoto, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qY2p0OH9A

[MadLittleMods]

I've been using Ghostty since the private beta (December 2023) but is now generally available and open source. It's great and has a solid design ethos driving it forward. Standards-compliant (works how you expect and even complex text-UI (TUI) programs that use fancy control-codes work), supports some fancier features (like Kitty grahpics/image support), performant/fast, mouse-draggable tabs, native UI and experience to the platform, plans for a settings GUI, and hopefully more nicety features to come. Basically all the goodness of iTerm2 but now cross-platform. It's super easy to build with Zig (zig build -p $HOME/.local -Doptimize=ReleaseFast).

The only big downside at the moment is that it doesn't have Ctrl + f search yet, tracked by ghostty-org/ghostty#189. There is a great workaround/substitute where you can press Ctrl + Shift + j which saves the scrollback buffer to a temporary file and pastes the path to the file so you can easily just open it in your favorite text editor.