An open-source, cross-platform terminal for seamless workflows

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That's the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.

And the installer is 117M compressed. That's MEGABYTES... For a terminal!

The mind boggles...

I've been using Alacritty for the last 4 years, it's kinda the opposite of this nonsense. It's written in Rust, it's super light weight, highly optimised, and uses hardware acceleration to render the terminal. It's top of the chart for every terminal performance benchmark conceived.

However, that lightness and fastness comes at a cost. There are some basic features they just won't add because they're outside the scope of the project. Eg, tabs ("just use a tiling wm and do your own tabs in the wm") or a scrollbar ("just use a shell with a scrolling screen buffer like Tmux"), or different coloured backgrounds for each opened window ("why would anyone ever want to do that?").

My holy grail terminal would be something like Alacritty, written in Rust, blisteringly fast and light weight, but with tabs, scrollbar, bookmarks, etc.

I find myself falling back to using Konsole a lot these days, it's got all the features I want, is fast enough, and already installed on every system I use Plasma on.
- Me too. I just ran time tree across my home directory a few times. Native console (ie C-A-F3) - 54 seconds, Konsole - eight seconds.
  
  Waveterm is still installing (Arch AUR). The fan has a Gentooesque sound to it as a suspiciously complicated thing gets built. Oh God ... electon ... terminal shaking ... golang ... fans whining ... lap melting ..... the Old Ones are stirring.
  
  The deps for this thing are many. " I watched Firefox builds on Gentoo glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate". OK, its now arrived and my laptop case is making ping noises as it cools.
  
  It takes 10 seconds or so to start up. Look pretty. Accept license agreement (wtf). Now what? Hmm lets try typing in that box. OK. time tree. Go back to Lemmy to type the last two paras of this comment, get bored and uninstall waveterm.
- Have a look at wezterm
- I never understand the whole thing around "fast" terminals. How can a terminal be "slow"? Surely the terminal you're using has no effect on the programs you're calling, so what's being measured here?
- Konsole is my second favorite terminal app. Wezterm may be your holy grail.
- Give tmux or emacs a try. Or just use Kitty.
- I am using Konsole currently, as it works best in KDE. Should I switch to Alacritty? I like to have one window and the rest in tabs, its pretty great. I guess alacritty doesnt have that right? What all does fit in the config? Konsole has tabs with special descriptors using path, host, program etc. You can change the color scheme, its pretty nice.
I swear. I quit using iTerm and moved to Kitty because it was too inefficient and was eating up my battery on the go. There are so many apps that are just diguised browsers that eat too much memory and processing power and they make needing a powerful machine a requirement if you want to have multiple apps open. It's getting to a ridiculous point and it's inconvenient.
I don't understand why desktop JS apps don't use React Native at least. It's still JavaScript but doesn't use a browser, and renders to native UI widgets. Far lighter than Electron.
- Well with react native you still have to deal with the native problem which a developer doesn't want to deal with, you know... You could... But if they really cared about making the app efficient and well they would have had a different decision making process... People nowadays don't really just the right tool for the job, they just have a tool and try to turn it in a universal hammer and solve everything with it
- The disadvantage with React Native is that you still have to maintain a UI for each platform because it maps to native widgets while a web UI works the same on every platform.
Waiting for the "fRee rAm iS unUseD raM" comment.
- But wasted ram is still wasted, unlike if the ram was actually used for caching or actually speeding things up, not bootstrapping a freaking browser
- Oh that one pisses me off so much... they act like its the only damn thing i have open.
- Except it's not: free ram is where disk cache lives, so the more free ram you have - the faster your system is (kinda)
The only stupid part is bundling a whole browser for a webpage. HTML5 as an executable format is fantastic - all the bullshit Java promised, except people actually use it. But for some godforsaken reason, everybody ships a platform-specific... portable OS... with every single program.

Electron and whatnot have turned "Java but good" into "Docker but awful."
This is why I use WezTerm and Guake. iTerm2 is okay on OSX.

From their FAQ:

Q: What shells does Wave Terminal support?
A: We currently only support bash. […]

Seems at least dishonest to advertise it as a "terminal" if it works only with a specific shell. It's okay to have extra features enabled by escape codes emitted by the shell, but if it goes beyond that, I'd say it's not just a terminal anymore.

It is a cross-platform terminal that supports only bash and only on Linux and MacOS
So, a browser frontend for bash... Nah, that sales pitch sucks (ram)

"modern", when it comes to terminals, usually translates to Javascript / web / electron

We are used to badly optimized webapps but there's some that definitely manage to be snappy wothout taking too much ressources
- Not that I dont dislike electron anyway, but I'd hazard a guess that most of the jank we see in electron apps is more to do with javascript and overengineered web UI frameworks than the browser runtime. If it runs like shit in a browser then it wont be much better ported to electron.
Kinda yes, sadly. However, at least they offer some reasoning for it like AI integration with the terminal.
- You don't need to make it an Electron app to have AI integration.
- Do you really need "AI", when a simple autocomplete/LSP plugin does wonders?
  
  Also, you have to be online for that. Uninterrupted electricity and internet is still a privilege.

Ditch Vim for quick updates.

GAAAAAAAASP

^heresy

"cross-platform" but it's not available for the most popular developer OS (Windows) 🤔

Edit: most popular OS as per the Stack Overflow dev survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-technologies-operating-system

most popular among c# devs
- Across all devs that fill out the Stack Overflow survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-technologies-operating-system
My kinda cross platform 🤘

Looks like bloat to me

I'm unsure that I would find this useful. While I might want a good solution to view web content on the terminal (with a modern, w3c standards rendering engine) so that I can do less outside of the terminal, I don't think I see the utility of using web tech to power my zsh and vim usage. I am enjoying my balance of utility and perf with kitty.

I hope you have a good experience and share your findings.

I will absolutely not use an electron terminal.

Looks like Electron. Oh boy...

I just finished my perfect st build after switching from kitty. So I'm not really interested in getting something even more bloated then what I used to use.

At least they aren't going for the new user friendly marketing they were a few weeks back, as they have nothing that would of helped me as a new user a few years ago

I've been looking for a terminal with better bookmark support; I use mRemoteNG on windows for my RDP/SSH work, and I haven't been happy with any alternative on Linux that handles session bookmarks like that. I'm curious to try this.

the hell are terminal bookmarks?
- I manage a lot of systems, so just click to open a ssh session in a new tab. I usually have shell aliases, but a bookmark that could set the title of the tab to the hostname and account for easier nav would be my goal. Being able to dynamically open tab groups too would be good, like if I have a dev/prod/SQL server for an app I could 1-click to open a group of 3 tabs
Windows Terminal has profiles that you can configure a lot so you can have SSH profiles too, don't know if that fits your use case exactly though

Interesting concept, I like the design, but the workflow is rather odd and would take some getting used to. Also, things like the UI need some work on scrolling, like the Sudo connect window scrolling the password out of sight if you fail the password entry.

I'm looking for a terminal like warp that's Linux compatible and this initially looked promising but the comments on how bloated it is is discouraging.

Is there a competitor or is that the first of its kind?

I think Tabby is a similar project, but personally I spin up and throw out terminals very liberally. Tabby had a horrendous launch time, something more than a second which constantly bothered me while trying to work. I'd love to see how quick this is though!
- +1 on tabby. Another nice feature tabby has is sync of secrets and settings. It is not very resource efficient, but it's still nice.
Closest I can think of is Warp, although right now it's still closed source and Mac only. If there are others I've missed I'd love to learn more!
- Yeah, deal breaker :D I'm not interested in mac software
- Warp has discoverability features that would actually convince me of using a "modern" terminal - like instant tooltips with documentation.
  
  That said, call it trust issues, but I'll never use a closed source terminal.
  
  I'd like to see more user-friendly features like this that are terminal-agnostic. Manually checking manpages is so slow and fickle. Having the equivalent of an intellisense for the command line would be awesome.

Looks interesting, I will look into it. On first look it seems useful