Linux

The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.

Indeed.

From the website linked in the post:

• Windows, Tabs, and Splits: Manage multiple terminal windows, each with several tabs and splits. Better yet, it is all rendered via native UI elements.
• GPU-Accelerated Rendering: Employs Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux for efficient, high-speed rendering.
• Hundreds of Themes: Swap between light and dark modes automatically, or choose from a vast library of visually appealing themes.
• Ligatures and Grapheme Clustering: Shows ligatures flawlessly, handles multi-codepoint emoji properly, and accurately renders Arabic and Hebrew (in left-to-right mode).
• Kitty Graphics Protocol Support: Let terminal applications display inline images for a richer visual experience.

It also says it's cross platform (macOS and Linux) and has configurable shortcuts with what they believe are sensible defaults.

Although at least Alacritty already has all of these features (very different “sensible” defaults, though) and is also available on Windows so I'm not sold.

GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it's just text. So I don't see a point why we shouldn't apply that to terminal emulators as well.

text is like the slowest thing to draw :P when debugging games, a running log can make the 3D rendering stutter significantly.

That's what I would have said till I tried using a TUI epub reader. The jankiness of line-level scrolling (rather than pixel-level like in a GUI app) is all but a deal breaker.

I was then most surprised to discover that terminal emulators with this amazing cutting-edge technology (smooth scrolling) do not even exist.

My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I'm not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.

I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.

SSHing to machines with bash seems to work fine, but it's a problem with ones that use fish, for some reason

You can do something like this:

TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@host

You could also install or copy over the term files or something. I can't recall. But it's the same as getting kitty to work which has more information online.

Kitty has tabs

Wezterm has tabs.

And HDR

Yes. But it doesn't have to replace your default terminal emulator. You can have multiple and use any of them.