The Terminal emulator wars

If you’ve been living under a rock and just came out this year, you’d be surprised how many new terminal emulators are popping up.

I’ve been an iTerm user for 10 years, but it may be time for an upgrade.

Most newcomers are written in sexy languages like Zig and Rust, support GPU acceleration by default, and some, like Wave, are AI-powered.

There has been much hype around Ghostty, primarily because Mitchell Hashimoto wrote it. Hashimoto previously built tools like Vagrant and Terraform before deciding to reimagine the terminal emulator.

Why switch?

The text rendering is snappy and extremely fast, the configuration is modern and straightforward, and it uses little CPU, even when outputting lots of text.

You might not care about this if you are not a heavy terminal user, but if you like to cat log files, you appreaciate the responsiveness.

If you are feeling fancy, it even supports custom shaders, so if you want your terminal to look like it’s running on a CRT … well now you can.

P.S. I also just discovered Yazi, a fantastic file manager for the terminal. It can render file previews straight in the terminal.

Yours,

Taj