dtach VS kitty

ssh from your favourite terminal to your workstation works fine. (I spent two COVID years working that way.) If you use multiple terminals, look up ssh multiplexing to improve performance a bit. If you want to keep remote sessions alive without mucking up your preferred terminal, try dtach.

Not the same, but I really dig using vim (neovim) as my terminal multiplexer. Vim has tools for managing windows, splits, all the things, and it felt redundant having two separate tools.

The one thing I needed was a way to attach/detach it, and have it survive across ssh disconnects. I struggled for a while trying to use things like reptyr or others. Eventually I remembered/rediscovered dtach, which is a very thin very simple proxy, as opposed to a full on terminal emulator / multiplexer. https://github.com/crigler/dtach

Not really, and for what TRAMP + vterm doesn't cover such as unexpected disconnects, there's dtach and detached.el.

GNU Screen, tmux and dtach (with convenient Emacs interface) all serve to limit that problem.

> What's an opinion you have that most people don't agree with?

> Haha. I specialize in having opinions people don’t agree with :) In kitty, the most controversial is probably that terminal multiplexers are the devils’ gift to mankind.

I cannot agree strongly enough that the virtualized rendering done by programs like screen & tmux is a curse. Trying to get truecolor tmux+ssh+tmux+vim working in truecolor mode is a disaster. Terminal-multiplexers emulate a screen and then render their buffered session to whomever is attached, and it's a frustrating, bad, lossy process. Often the original session and what attaches don't match, and there's not much one can really do. I am not a terminal expert but the situation seems awful, & is one of the highest elder crafts of computing, far more subtle & deranged than one could ever imagine.

Kitty tries to re-build a lot of these terminal multiplexer functionalities itself. It has tabs, it has splits. Generally kitty is a pretty do-all terminal system. Afaik there's not really any way presently to solve the root of these mismatch problems, which is basically that programs generally don't reevaluate their TERM environment variable, even though these environs are technically editable at runtime (by the process, or outsiders).

Kovid (Kitty author) talks about being a vim user. I too am a vim user. In fact, one of my favorite techniques has been to just live inside vim, to use it's terminal emulator, to get ok (i'm still pretty not good) at using it's splits and windows to lay stuff out. The one missing agent for me was that I wanted a way to be able to detach my vim session & come back latter. I spent considerable time trying reptyr & other ways to reattach processes. After much failure at getting vim to detach/reattach, to persist across sessions, I eventually re-encountered a program dtach[1] I'd run into years ago, which works great. Unlike tmux and screen, it's not a terminal emulator. It's just a dumb pipe that a program can render into, and a way to reattach to that pipe again latter. It can run in detached mode so that if your session exits, the program stays open. This way, I can just open vim & have my entire workspace inside vim, with whatever terminals I need, and detach/reattach the vim session at my leisure.

[1] https://github.com/crigler/dtach

So now whenever you execute that command, it will update the channel with the current price. You can then run it on a loop, crontab, whatever you want. One of my favorite things to do is to use while $true loops, and applications like dtach.

i prefer to use dtach for that if I only need this feature

And kitty is much faster according to this: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2701#issuecomment...

Also typometer based measurements also on Linux. Shrug.

kitty (Linux & Macos)

A terminal with built-in telemetry and a pricing model... Just what I never wanted!

To avoid being too negative, I'll offer the option of Kitty[1]. My current favorite terminal. Supports many features.

Including my personal favorites:

* ctrl+c (as opposed to stupid things like ctrl+shift+c) to copy data only when you have content selected. Otherwise, ctrl+c sends a sigint like normal.

* font ligature support (a controversial feature)

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

The ncurses/xterm maintainer also had quite a lot of friction with the developer of the kitty terminal emulator.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879

IME, this is like the golden age of terminal apps in general and macOS-compatible ones in particular. There are several really good terminals for macOS:

[iTerm2 app](https://iterm2.com/)

[Kitty terminal](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)

[WezTerm terminal](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html)

[Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty)

My daily driver is WezTerm…

- Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows 10 and FreeBSD

- [Multiplex terminal panes, tabs and windows on local and remote hosts, with native mouse and scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html)

- [Ligatures](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...), Color Emoji and font fallback, with true color and [dynamic color schemes](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/appearance.html#colors).

- [Hyperlinks](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/hyperlinks.html)

- [Searchable Scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/scrollback.html) (use mouse wheel and `Shift-PageUp` and `Shift PageDown` to navigate, Ctrl-Shift-F to activate search mode)

- xterm style selection of text with mouse; paste selection via `Shift-Insert` (bracketed paste is supported!)

- SGR style mouse reporting (works in vim and tmux)

- Render underline, double-underline, italic, bold, strikethrough (most other terminal emulators do not support as many render attributes)

- Configuration via a [configuration file](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/files.html) with hot reloading

- Multiple Windows (Hotkey: `Super-N`)

- Splits/Panes (Split horizontally/vertically: `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-%` and `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-"`, move between panes: `Ctrl-Shift-ArrowKey`)

- Tabs (Hotkey: `Super-T`, next/prev: `Super-Shift-[` and `Super-Shift-]`, go-to: `Super-[1-9]`)

- [SSH client with native tabs](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ssh.html)

- [Connect to serial ports for embedded/Arduino work](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/serial.html)

- Connect to a local multiplexer server over unix domain sockets

- Connect to a remote multiplexer using SSH or TLS over TCP/IP

- iTerm2 compatible image protocol support, and built-in [imgcat command](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/imgcat.html)

- Kitty graphics support

- Sixel graphics support (experimental: starting in `20200620-160318-e00b076c`)

While researching how to fix the issue I found this GitHub issue with the fun number 606 (almost 666). First, I should say, that there is no easy solution. Shortly you have to specify for each shortcut mapping alternative with your keyboard layout. That means, for example, if your keyboard has Cyrillic "м" instead of Latin "v" then for making work CMD+V you should add also into configuration an additional line with "м".

I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (there’s a lot going on in those screenshots), and (3) it’s likely slow (I might be completely wrong).

To elaborate a bit…

1. I love good design work and well-designed (UI-wise) software, and it certainly looks like the creators of Wave Terminal have made that a priority.

2. UX-wise, there’s just too much going on. As someone who lives in my terminal (with the exception of browsing the web, I do virtually everything in my terminal), it’s the single most important piece of software on my computer and it can never get in my way. I used the same terminal for many years and only switched to kitty [0] a couple years ago after testing it for months. In all of those years, every single terminal I tested managed to get in my way. Somehow, kitty manages to be packed full of features without ever—not even once—getting in my way, being slow, or freezing up on me.

3. Generally speaking, I think building on open web standards is a great thing and a plus. Unfortunately though, even in 2023, my experience has been that it’s really hard to build performant software meant to be run on native platforms using web technologies; the few who get this right—e.g., Figma—are anomalies and they generally invest an enormous amount of time and engineering capital into squeezing out as much performance as possible. As I explained in #2, for something as critical as my terminal, not being performant is simply not an option, so as much as I love the idea of building on open web standards, it actually scares me for software like this.

That said, I’m obviously judging before trying here, so I’ll make some time to test Wave Terminal.

[0]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty

to solve this I run Kitty with a tab bar on the bottom. this has tons of inspo: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/4447

Those existing tools are poorly designed, if you read the article it has a link to the discussion about its design choices, which contains in turn discussion about all the problems with sixel https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/33#issuecomment-2...