Windows Terminal VS alacritty

> convince management of the value

This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.

There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.

Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:

> I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…

Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.

At this point ConHost.exe is open source [0] so it is maybe not a stretch to expect Microsoft to open source CMD.EXE at some point.

Though with PowerShell being cross-platform and already open source, I personally don't think there's enough to gain in some sort of better open source CMD.EXE fork. I'd be interested in being proved wrong on that, but I'm also happy enough with PowerShell these days I'm not in a hurry to return to CMD.EXE.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/host

"Users of Linux and macOS may well be familiar with the sudo command, used regularly in the terminal, and it looks like Windows may finally be getting its own version."

More Linux tools are coming to Windows, especially Windows Server because the tools are good and they make it easier to administer a Windows Server.

They are looking at adding a default TUI text editor (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440) and now they are adding sudo.

I would not be surprised if systemd or something like it gets ported or reinvented for Windows simply because it makes managing services so nice.

GitHub

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it.

People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.

An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.

If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.

If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.

An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.

Windows Terminal is pretty good and a new terminal emulator written in the last few years. No smooth scrolling, here's the GitHub issue requesting it: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1400

Assume its related to this:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

It's nothing serious just microsoft engineers writing slow as shit code and reacting poorly to someone trying to help.

"There are plenty of offline scenarios where this would be incredibly useful. For disconnected environments, etc. There are some environments that will never connect to winget."

Source: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440#disc...

It's opinionated, which comes with upsides and downsides. I won't blame the maintainer to keep things focused, feature creep (even for worthy features) can kill a FOSS project.

Another example is sixel support, there's a fork where it all works but is not sufficiently "proven" (code quality just as well as sixel being the best fit for the problem)

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/4763#issuecommen...

It may be annoying but I get the reasoning, and there are other terminals.

alacritty (Linux, Macos & Windows)

> Ligatures: ok, nice, possible in terms too (hopefully Alacritty one day)

I wouldn't hold my breath. Seems like its getting the iPad calculator treatment[0]. Which is to say rather than ship something working that can be improved, they're leaving a UX void.

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

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`)

# We use Alacritty's default Linux config directory as our storage location here. mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme ~/.config/alacritty/themes

if by 'in the terminal' you mean 'in a program emulating an ascii terminal' then no, because ascii terminals don't support anything that looks better than ascii art. they don't support sixel either. there are a variety of proposals for how to add graphics to ascii terminal emulators in a backwards-compatible way, such as mgr and notty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/51

but the 'terminal' that a terminal emulator is emulating is a device which provides a user access to a remote computer. normally nowadays this is a laptop or cellphone. in that case, yes, you can use x-windows, xpra, vnc, or a web browser

A decent terminal application (i.e: iterm2, alacritty, etc.)

I have been having random input lags with Alacritty. Initially I thought it was my custom neovim config. After some investigation, I have found an Alacritty github issue where users are reporting the same issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844

Thank you for your suggestions. I have now narrow it down to my terminal emulator. Alacritty. More precisely this issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844