#Best mac terminal emulator upgrade#
#Best mac terminal emulator full#
#Best mac terminal emulator windows#

#Best mac terminal emulator windows#

Basically, it lets you control kitty windows from the command line or Python scripts. One feature I really like is kitty’s remote control protocol. In my experience, it also feels a bit faster than both iTerm and Alacritty.

Kitty has a very minimal UI, but it has quite a bit of built in functionality: it has a well-defined remote control API, it supports extensions, windows can be split much like tmux does (although I still prefer tmux), and it provides very fine-grained font control. iTerm, on the other hand, is very feature-rich, with built in features to handle the kind of window splitting that tmux provides, and menu options for everything.

Alacritty is extremely minimal, with the idea that it should be used with something like tmux to provide more features. Kitty sits somewhere between Alacritty and iTerm when it comes to features. It also uses OpenGL for rendering, so even large windows feel very solid. I’ve used both Alacritty and iTerm2, and while both are quite good, I’ve been using kitty for the last few months. iTerm2, probably the most popular third-party terminal client for macOS, released its own hardware-accelerated rendering engine, using Apple’s Metal framework, with version 3.2 in August of 2018. It was initially released in September 2018, just a couple months before the previous version of this article was published. Alacritty, which bills itself as “fastest terminal emulator in existence,” uses OpenGL for hardware-accelerated rendering. Speed has become something of a focus for terminal clients over the last couple of years. And while a few extra milliseconds of key press latency may not sound like much, it can become noticeable when you spend 90% of your day using text-based applications and interacting with a shell.

#Best mac terminal emulator full#

Terminal.app is pretty fast, but I would still occasionally see flickering in my full screen tmux sessions. The other issues I would occasionally run into were redraw times and keypress latency. Some of the vim extensions I had picked up really benefited from more color flexibility, so Terminal.app was starting to feel limiting. I mean, you can set the palette for a theme to any colors you like, but programs are limited to 256 colors. For one (and the one that got me started looking at other terminals), it doesn’t support true color.

Last year I was using Apple’s Terminal.app, which is a great terminal client, but it does have a couple of downsides.

#Best mac terminal emulator upgrade#

Also, feel free to open issues if you have questions or suggestions! Terminal upgrade Rather than starting from scratch, I’ll discuss some of the interesting changes I’ve made to my environment over the last year: new tools I’ve started using, and configuration changes that have improved my productivity.Īll of the configuration files and scripts discussed in this article are available in my dotfiles repo, so you can always look there for more information. This article is a continuation of the previous one. I’m using a new terminal application, my vim environment has changed dramatically (at least behind the scenes), and I started using a pretty neat keyboard-based window manager. However, I have made a few changes to improve usability and make my day-to-day work feel faster. Many things remain the same: I’m using neovim, zsh, and tmux. It’s been a year since I last talked about my development environment.