State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope and test data concerns

  • Several comments note that ucs-detect’s results use outdated versions of some terminals (e.g., VTE, Konsole, Foot, Kitty, Zutty, xterm Sixel support), making 2025 rankings somewhat misleading.
  • Multiple people submit or suggest pull requests to refresh results, emphasizing that the test suite is easy to run and the ranking is only about Unicode behavior, not overall quality or performance.
  • Some feel the article title overpromises (“state of terminals”) given it only measures Unicode conformance, which may be irrelevant for users who rarely hit complex Unicode cases.

WezTerm, Kitty, Ghostty, and preferences

  • WezTerm fans cite strong Lua programmability, multiplexing, native SSH, configurability, and speed to open a window as key reasons to choose it over Kitty or Ghostty.
  • Others report font rendering quirks in WezTerm but say they can be configured away.
  • Kitty is liked for graphics protocol and features, but some are moving away due to deliberate limits (e.g., tmux support) or deprecations.
  • Ghostty gets praise for polish, performance, UI, and especially its advanced built‑in theme picker; some users say it feels like a “better Alacritty.”

Images and graphics protocols (Sixel, Kitty, etc.)

  • There is active debate over Sixel vs Kitty image protocols and other schemes (iTerm2, Inline Images).
  • Pro‑image users rely on inline images for:
    • Remote image viewing over SSH,
    • File manager previews,
    • Plots from Python/Julia/ML tooling,
    • Debugging graphics-heavy pipelines.
  • Skeptics see all image protocols as inefficient or “gimmicky,” arguing that proper remote graphics should use dedicated protocols (X forwarding, Wayland tools, RDP, web apps) instead of overloading terminals.
  • Historical and technical notes: Sixel is older and simpler; Kitty protocol is more powerful but larger and harder to implement, contributing to fragmentation.

Platform defaults and ergonomics

  • macOS Terminal ranks low in tests; some say it’s stagnant but “good enough” and lighter than alternatives, others strongly prefer richer tools like iTerm2/Ghostty.
  • Windows Terminal ranks surprisingly high and is praised for tabs, theming, and “smart” Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V (copy when selected, interrupt otherwise), which many find ergonomically superior.
  • Linux/X11/Wayland users mention primary selection (select + middle‑click) as very convenient, but keyboard‑only users push back.

Ghostty strengths and missing pieces

  • Strong enthusiasm for Ghostty’s theme picker and overall UX; some call it mind‑blowing compared to Alacritty.
  • Major commonly cited gap: no native scrollback search yet. It’s on the roadmap but not “immediate,” which is a deal‑breaker for some and irrelevant for others (especially heavy tmux users).
  • Some note Ghostty’s higher memory usage vs minimalist terminals like Foot, likely due to its GTK + GPU approach.

Other notable terminals

  • Foot (Wayland-only) is lauded as extremely fast, lightweight, and responsive; users mention very low launch time and nice link‑opening UX.
  • Konsole’s high ranking is welcomed; users like its KDE integration, configurability, infinite scrollback backed by files, and Dolphin “open terminal here” integration.
  • Alacritty is still appreciated for speed and simplicity, but lack of images and long‑standing ligature issues push some to newer options.
  • xterm, st and forks are mentioned as having strong legacy features (Sixel, ReGIS, Tek 4010, patches), but are hard to compare because of patch culture and defaults.

Unicode, emojis, and TUI pain points

  • Some say they “never use non‑ASCII,” but others argue Unicode is unavoidable in filenames, logs, non‑English text, and tools that output emojis.
  • Several users actively dislike emojis in terminals and CLIs, viewing them as noisy, hard to grep, and visually unclear; they prefer making them optional.
  • Developers building TUIs describe Unicode as a minefield: different terminals cluster graphemes differently, ambiguous widths vary, and there is no reliable way to know how many columns a sequence will occupy.
  • Debate over “correct” handling of variation selectors (especially VS‑15 for text presentation of emoji): some claim only a couple of terminals “get it right”; others counter that these behaviors don’t match the Unicode spec and can create layout bugs.

Security, trust, and conservatism

  • A few users are reluctant to adopt “non‑standard” or newer terminals because they type passwords into them and want maximum trust, sticking to system defaults like Konsole or macOS Terminal if they are “good enough.”

Philosophy and future directions

  • Some are excited about richer terminal capabilities: images, variable‑sized text, even embedded GUI/Wayland compositors; others worry about turning terminals into half‑browsers and prefer strict, simple, VT‑style behavior.
  • There’s nostalgia for “real” terminals and classic scripting‑heavy tools (e.g., vintage BBS clients, DEC hardware), contrasted with frustration that modern terminals still emulate decades‑old models instead of adopting a clean, modern text/graphics protocol.