How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm
11 comments
·October 29, 20250cf8612b2e1e
Could someone sell me on one of these alternative terminals (kitty, ghostty, wez, etc)? There is probably something I am missing not using GPU backed rendering, but I don’t know what I don’t know.
prmph
All I know is that on MacOS iTerm2 is unmatched. Every few months I go in search of something similar to it (as a backup), and every single time, after trying countless terminals, I give up. The closest I've found is WezTerm, and even that is a pale shadow of Iterm2
rao-v
All I want is terminals to share config across MacOS, Linux and ideally Windows and have great support for SSHing into low end boxes with some minimal persistence solution like tmux on them. In an ideal world I would not have to think about mouse capture and scroll modes, they’d work seamlessly across my device and the devices I’m SSHed into.
It shocked me when I got back into playing with multiple machines after over a decade that this mostly still does not exist.
Instead we’re finally doing gpu rendering (which is amazing but … surprising for this to be the 2025 topic du jour?)
corytheboyd
I just recently decided to replace iterm2 with wezterm when I started moving macbook over to nix. iterm2 is about the only one that didn’t work well for this, since you can’t source control the configuration (import/export doesn’t cut it)
Any of the ones you mentioned would probably work good with nix too. I don’t really care about the config being scriptable at all, it was just the first terminal that easily let me set all of the keyboard shortcuts I wanted, so I stuck with it.
jamesgeck0
iTerm2 does support source control; I've got my settings in a git repo managed by Chezmoi. In the settings dialog, under "General" -> "Settings", there's an "External settings: Load settings from a custom folder or URL" option.
lordgroff
Kitty and wez both have the ability to present graphics on the terminal which may sound like a solution in search of a problem, but once you start using the capability, it's hard to live without it.
Wez is also cross platform so I get to use it on my Linux and Mac and my (Ugh) Windows work machine. Configuration being done in Lua is also something I quite like, but your mileage may vary on that one.
andai
I tried a few of them and they were all way slower than xfce4-terminal. So I just kept using that.
I don't really dump megabytes of text into the terminal, they might have an edge there? (I found that xterm is much faster than xfce4-terminal for that.)
fwip
To be completely honest, the reason I switched was for true-color support in my editor (vim), rather than being limited to just 256 colors.
foobarqux
The main features I use are
1. quick-select the output in the terminal (select files/paths, urls, etc and either copy or paste them at the cursor). This is very useful as you often don't have the foresight to pipe the command to pipe the output of the command to some selection mechanism and even placing text on the line-editor is not that easy by default.
2. view images (sixel or kitty protocol). This is pretty useful visual analog to cat that doesn't require opening another program and works over ssh. Also for video.
There are some other nice utilities for doing things like downloading files directly in the terminal (it2dl for iterm and kitten transfer for kitty).
kitty doesn't work out of the box on macos if I remember; you have to set configuration for option/command etc.
I get the error `Your store is blocked` when trying to load the images