Okay, I Like WezTerm

https://alexplescan.com/posts/2024/08/10/wezterm/

by alexpls • 2 years ago

488 275 2 years ago

alexplescan.com

sidmitra• 2 years ago

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/colorschemes/

^ There's a host of built-in color schemes.

enricozb2• 2 years ago

One thing I was looking for just yesterday was a way to dump my terminal's (alacrity) scrollback - escape sequences and all - to stdout. I wanted to pipe it to my text editor to search. Alacrity doesn't seem to have this unfortunately, but wezterm does with get-text.

saurik4• 2 years ago

Have you tried xterm? It takes a bit longer to configure, as its defaults are universally horrible, but I've found the result to be worth the effort. FWIW, it has this feature you are talking about as part of it's "print" functionality. I bound ctrl-shift-P to print-everything() and then set printerCommand to `xterm -class modal -e sh -c 'vim +"setlocal buftype=nofile" +"g/^$/d" +"normal G$" - <&3' 3<&` (which might be crazy; I didn't think through it for very long). You can use printAttributes to tell it to include the format escape sequences, though (personally) I have that turned off for this purpose (as I find it makes it more difficult to search in my editor; but, again: I didn't spend much time on the editor side of this arrangement).

enricozb2• 2 years ago

Hmm I'll have to look into this. After some basic playing around with this feature it might be workable. In my head I had my editor taking over the current program in the terminal, and after exiting it would return to the previous program, but that involves some backgrounding and job manipulation that I haven't given too much thought. Thanks for the tip.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

The main feature for me is splitting panes. I used to that in tilix and got western working exactly the same (can't stand tmux , sorry).

The Lua configuration is very intuitive as well.

I do get some indirect crashes when Xwayland crashes, which is rare. I had to disable Wayland support in wezterm because the window decorations aren't great yet.

abhinavk3• 2 years ago

Same. Panes and tabs are must in a modern terminal emulator. I like tmux but not on my workstation.

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

I'm with you! tmux is pretty much a non-starter for me beyond a remote job manager.

My window manager (Sway) already requires enough wild incantations. If any, I really appreciate simple integration in the terminal.

A little more than 'foot' but not a lot. Tabs/panes, like you say. It gives some more granularity to the organization without a lot of new buttons to push.

I've taken most of the Tilix defaults through several! Currently Kitty... though I may try WezTerm.

sodapopcan• 2 years ago

Nice write up, may try out WezTerm though I only just recently switched to Kitty and I don't like hopping around too often. Correction related to Kitty, though. It does not use either YAML or TOML, it has its own simple config DSL and is otherwise fully scriptable via Python.

mobilemidget• 2 years ago

same here, I just bookmarked it for now

replete4• 2 years ago

iTerm's quake-style visor mode bound to a hotkey is too good to give up...

marliechiller• 2 years ago

This the the one feature keeping me from jumping. Its so handy!

BiteCode_dev• 2 years ago

Often you hear it should be the desktop job to do this, but given most of them don't, it's moot.

replete4• 2 years ago

I wish I could bind applications to slide out from left and right, I use slidepad on Mac which is a slide out web browser, and TotalFinder which has a visor feature for the bottom. Little things like this keep me on Mac to be honest

rekoil• 2 years ago

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I want the feature.

I have it in iTerm, and I don't in WezTerm.

We can blame Apple if we want, but they are not going to implement this feature for us.

lkuty• 2 years ago

"quake-style visor mode" what is that feature? I am currently using iTerm2.

replete4• 2 years ago

In Quake, the video game, a console would slide down from the top of the screen when you pressed tilde. Combined with splitting terminals its incredibly convenient to have 4 or 5 terminals toggle on a hotkey

eviks3• 2 years ago

dont think you need to give it up, there is a description on how to do that in https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/1751

lambdaba3• 2 years ago

On macOS you can easily set this up with Hammerspoon, and it'll be independent of the app being toggled, as it should.

rdtsc2• 2 years ago

I like it too, and have switched from iTerm2 to WezTerm recently. I tried some others, but WezTerm has window splitting which I use quite a bit so settled on it. Lua config is nice, although I am a minimal config kind of a person, so only have a few settings in there.

Yeah, iTerm2 has a lot of other fancy features, but I just rarely or never used them, so don't really feel like I miss anything.

replete4• 2 years ago

ITerm has window splitting btw

rdtsc2• 2 years ago

I know that’s why looked for something that also has it. Alacrity didn’t from what I could see.

throwaway11943• 2 years ago

Try it on Asahi next.

throwaway11943• 2 years ago

Why the downvote?

leblancfg2• 2 years ago

Recently switched to WezTerm and I'm very happy. Was using kitty before that – loved the set up and simplicity coming from iTerm2. WezTerm is leaps and bounds better in terms of what comes out-of-the-box. My terminal config is short enough to sit all in one screen on my editor. After that, the terminal just... gets out of the way and I don't need to think about it.

But the straw that broke my back with using kitty was, I'd end up encountering issues or trying to recreate some of iTerm2's features, only to end up time and again on kitty's maintainer's terse and dismissive comments.

e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up.

adumer• 2 years ago

Interestingly enough, the article points out something I had the exact same terse and dismissive experience with kitty - following OS theme.

saurik4• 2 years ago

Yeah: the kitty developer is definitely the sort who believes that he not only knows better than everyone else how to use a terminal, but that everyone else's opinions are fundamentally invalid. That his terminal fails to correctly render such stalwarts as the Linux "make menuconfig" UI and there are no settings to fix it as he doesn't believe in settings is, to me, telling. I then find reading his posts on issue trackers not just insulting, but even "activating" in a way that is really unhealthy, as it results in me feeling a need to "defend" some random bit of terminal usage with just as much vigor, lest he get away with making everyone else sound like THEY are crazy... it really isn't healthy. I can't know for sure--as we don't live in this reality--but I'd like to think that, even if he and I agreed on literally everything there is to do with terminals, that I'd still have the same mindset that I'd rather write my own terminal than ever use his.

actinium226• 2 years ago

I guess this is what people mean when they say a piece of software is "opinionated"?

AdmiralAsshat2• 2 years ago

Remember that this is the guy who said he would personally maintain python 2 because he didn't want to rewrite calibre for python 3 [0].

I try not to knock the guy, given that kitty and calibre in particular are amazing programs, but I still think you've gotta keep that in mind when engaging.

FWIW, his conduct on the MobileRead forums where he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers.

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

he doesn't believe in settings

wait... whut? No thanks, I like to customize things

throwanem2• 2 years ago

Does WezTerm support an equivalent of iTerm's "hotkey window"?

For those unfamiliar, that's a window tied to a show/hide keybinding which when shown floats above all other windows, making a terminal instantly available everywhere - a feature I could live without, but don't care to. I'd love to switch for all of WezTerm's other features, but without that it's simply a nonstarter for me.

lambdaba3• 2 years ago

You can set this up very easily with Hammerspoon, and have it work with whichever terminal or app you want.

ssijak• 2 years ago

That is the first thing I configure in iTerm. To have it slide down like Quake terminal, and hide it from the dock

lupusreal• 2 years ago

If you use X, you can use tdrop to do this with any window. I have it set up with kitty, pcmanfm, and emacs client.

technojamin• 2 years ago

Not out of the box, but I use Hammerspoon to implement a global hotkey to show WezTerm: https://github.com/jaminthorns/environment/blob/a609e81f3f41...

I don't have a keybinding to hide, but you could easily achieve that by inspecting the active window with `hs.window.focusedWindow()`/`hs.window.frontmostWindow()` and making the behavior conditional based on the application: https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.window.html#focusedWindo...

In WezTerm, you can control whether the terminal is always on top with the `ToggleAlwaysOnTop` action: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/keyassignment/Togg...

ainka-ainka• 2 years ago

I do it using https://gist.github.com/meowtochondria/8b99b8fbf364eec41ef66... on my Debian based machine running X11. I've bound this script to a key as a global shortcut using OS provided facilities. See the comment on gist if you have a different setup and want to adapt it to your needs. Algo: 1. Find path to wezterm binary by looking at desktop file 2. Use pgrep to get pid of running binary from previous step. 3. If no window is running, launch desktop file using gio 4. If window is running, bring it to front using wmctrl

wyclif• 2 years ago

Is the setting you're talking about the one under Settings>General>Startup>Window Restoration Policy>Only Restore Hotkey Window, or something else?

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

How are start-up times?

I mostly like kitty but I’ve noticed that it takes a couple seconds to start up when I put my cpu down to 400Mhz. (Which might seem like an odd thing to do, but xterm handles it fine and, hey, why do we need billions of clock cycles to start up a terminal? That’s ridiculous).

fn-mote• 2 years ago

Try using `kitty --single-instance`.

teamspirit• 2 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what reason do you have to do that? Really curious to hear.

iaresee2• 2 years ago

I'm kitty + tmux and have been for a while now. What kind of problems were you encountering?

bibstha• 2 years ago

I recently moved from Kitty+Tmux to Tmux only setup. I think the maintainer has implemented most of the features in tmux like split panes, switching, changing layouts etc and is probably why says what he says.

For me, I've found Kitty quite configurable enough to have everything except the remote server thing. I used this as my guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/KittyTerminal/comments/z2p2sh/ditch...

colordrops• 2 years ago

As I get older, overly opinionated and dismissive maintainers are perhaps the biggest red flag for avoiding a project now. They often have what looks like the best product out there, but once you get embedded in the product you get stuck in their choices and have nowhere to turn.

bramhaag• 2 years ago

e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up.

Heh, I switched from Kitty to Wezterm due to the exact same types of comments from the maintainer. It's his project of course, and he's a great programmer, but some humility wouldn't hurt.

hodapp• 2 years ago

My story is about the same as yours. Kovid's arrogance pushed me away.

Arnavion• 2 years ago

and he's a great programmer

The people who had to deal with the Calibre setuid binaries fiasco in 2011 would probably disagree :) ( https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ )

godelski4• 2 years ago

  > the exact same types of comments from the maintainer.

Kovid really bugs me and is a reason I turned away from kitty too. I saw his character when looking up tmux issues. He's brash like Linus, but at least while Linus is calling you an idiot he'll tell you a better way to solve your problem. Kovid seems to think tmux is really about splitting panes and peoples' main draw to it isn't about persistence...

Oh, and kitty phones home

If you want drama:

tmux:

  - https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/391

Phone Home:

  - https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544
  - https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2481

On a side note: I really don't trust devs who reply to issues and close them. I get wanting to remove the issue from the task list, but just set up an action for stale issues (which has an added advantage of pinging the user who may have just lost the message). Otherwise let the user close because they might have follow-up questions. It's just disrespectful and always a red flag. I know lots of users are dumb (I literally just got an issue on a research project with someone asking how they fine tune our model...), but noobs are wizards in training. You don't have to be nice, but don't be mean either. Plus, you'll just piss off people who could end up helping you. And if you don't want help, I expect your project to decay when you get bored. Definitely not what I want from a terminal

twidxuga• 2 years ago

+1 on the point about humility (or lack thereof), exactly my experience looking at past issues in Kitty.

KolenCh2• 2 years ago

I concur, a few problems leading me to migrate from kitty to wezterm are related to tmux, color, and ssh.

cpuguy83• 2 years ago

Somewhat fresh kitty user (a few weeks now). What's your ssh issue?

Also saw Wezterm pop up last week and definitely decided I'll give it a go here soon.

gaws2• 2 years ago

"How do I set up tmux with kitty?"

What problems were you encountering? It's not hard to run tmux (and use all the keybindings with it) in kitty.

ocodo• 2 years ago

While I see nothing particularly egregious about Kitty's maintainer, other than being a bit of a dick, it's not really the job of a maintainer to be your pal.

Except, when I started using WezTerm at the start of this year... omg, this guy is absolutely fantastic.

I have read scores of his posts and he's struck the perfect tone in every single one. Love this guy, really, he's awesome.

worthless-trash• 2 years ago

For those of us wishing to see, what links are you referring to ?

deanishe• 2 years ago

On the same note, Benny Kjær Nielsen, the developer of MailMate for macOS is absolutely amazing.

He spent half a day debugging a rather trivial issue with me and even sent me a custom build.

MailMate: https://freron.com/

_xiaz3• 2 years ago

kitty has the rudest maintainer I know in all of open source software

setopt• 2 years ago

How is WezTerm compared to iTerm2, since you’ve used both?

I’ve tried Kitty a few times, since it has a few features I miss in iTerm2 (e.g. the “i3-gaps” aesthetics if you set the right flags, a plaintext config that is easier to sync, and its graphics and keyboard protocols have a wider ecosystem than iTerm2’s comparable features, and the “layout” feature).

But… I generally find that iTerm2 “just works” and requires little fiddling to get all the everyday stuff to work as I want, but I’ve been down many rabbit holes with my Kitty config. For now I’ve therefore stuck with iTerm2, but imagine that a well-configured Kitty might be nicer.

Is WezTerm a good middle ground?

colesantiago• 2 years ago

There are so many terminals out there.

Curious what sort of features and other things you look for when looking or comparing terminals like WezTerm and the like?

What are your deal breakers and must haves of a terminal emulator?

ishaanbahal3• 2 years ago

For me, speed, simplicity in configuration, and no AI is more or less a good start. I moved from iTerm to Warp recently, before switching to wezterm, and the only reason i dropped Warp (despite signing in) was that it comes in your way a lot, the click to focus on blocks becomes a hindrance for me (I hardly care for the previous blocks), the constant reminders in Red to update and obviously the AI prompting, albeit to the side, they keep trying to find a way for me to use it, but I'd rather stick with CTRL+R or quick google search than write a coherent sentence explaining things to a LLM.

I left iTerm because I couldn't configure it to my liking, although there are certainly ways to do it, i just couldn't. iTerm2 is certainly a good enough terminal, wezterm just somehow suits my needs better.

greazy• 2 years ago

I've been using wezterm for more than a year. The defaults are very good.

I need to look into all the advanced features.

vladstudio• 2 years ago

Upvote! I tried Mac Terminal, iTerm2, Kitty, Warp, etc etc, and settled with WezTerm. Easy to configure, fast, looks nice. I created a theme for it too:

https://tiniri.vlad.studio/

pivo• 2 years ago

I like your light Vlad theme, installed! Thank you!

nop_slide• 2 years ago

This theme is very nice! Any way to get it into JetBrains editors?

robotmachine• 2 years ago

Seconded ^

mattgreenrocks• 2 years ago

Beautiful theme!

kissgyorgy• 2 years ago

Very nice!

iamnotarobotman• 2 years ago

Also tried these terminals as well but stuck with Wezterm in the end and its one of my favourites.

I happened to have stumbled upon here to compare those terminals on this site: https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/

Looks pretty useful to me or anyone else that wants to compare terminals.

hosteur• 2 years ago

I just want to say that I love your color themes! Would love one for Konsole and Sublime Text.

maztaim2• 2 years ago

I'm a long time tmux fan, but I've been dealing with odd issues related to mouse actions. This is somewhere in alacritty, *vim or tmux. So I futzed with all of them, tried different terminals, all while telling myself it couldn't be tmux. So I just ignored it for over a year. I finally went back and gave wezterm a serious try just a few weeks ago and I am very happy to have switched. The mouse issues I was seeing go away. Splitting panes and resizing lots of panes is fast and responsive. It's built in so copying from a vertical split pane doesn't include the other pane like in tmux.

That doesn't make it perfect. Mouse themes are applied inconsistently as I use Gnome on Wayland. It also seems to be a problem when using neovim, but I can't prove it clearly enough to want to file a bug with anyone. Besides, everything I need to do still works and I rarely use the mouse unless I am copying random gobs of text.

I am sticking with wezterm for the moment. I have no reason to leave it at this point and it helped me reduce the complexity of my stack a teeny bit.

bdhcuidbebe2• 2 years ago

for tmux replacement, check out zellij for a modern take.

https://zellij.dev/

maztaim2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the link. I've tried this in the past. I feel no reason to try this with wezterm as what I need is already included.

hypnotist• 2 years ago

I use tmux daily. tried to like wezterm but issues with clipboard and resizing made look for another option. Very happy with Tilix now. https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/

maybe less fancy/modern but absolutely rock solid every time.

environment: fedora/wayland/gnome

just throwing this out if anyone wants to test an alternative it out.

bdhcuidbebe2• 2 years ago

Whats not to like of wezterm??

My favorite and often overlooked feature is that wezterm is fully cross os, so if you work like me in Linux, macOS and Windows, then you can just learn wezterm and be done. I even share large parts of my terminal config across os:es.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

that's where the language choices really matter I think. Lua as a programmable configuration language shines because it makes it quite easy to make environment specific changes. Also I think underrated side effect of Rust. A lot of the modern rust tooling has great cross platform support probably because there's a good abstraction layer between language and OS.

0cf8612b2e1e• 2 years ago

Isn’t that more just any language not C or C++? Go, Rust, Java, Python, etc all abstract away significant OS specifics. There are always going to be some thorny differences, but any modern language makes cross compatibility possible in a way that is more challenging for C.

jasonjayr• 2 years ago

I used wezterm a long while after switching from urxvt. There was a GPU memory leak or something, becuase after opening a bunch of terminals, I found that Graphics in firefox started lagging and dragging. I switched to kitty (And Microsoft Terminal on windows), but I use tmux inside (apparently much to the authors annoyance).

I should wezterm another look ...

tjoff• 2 years ago

I've had similar issues the last few months and have had to switch back to alacritty on every machine I own.

bbkane4• 2 years ago

If macos, it's maybe the same issue as https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/2669 . There's a config fix there that fixed the lag for me

cbm-vic-20• 2 years ago

The one thing I don't like about WezTerm, at least the reason why I stopped using it, is related to how it handles copying wrapped lines into the clipboard. It might just be me, and how I use tmux, but I found that when copying a line that gets wrapped, it includes a newline in the copied text. Very annoying, and I think it has to do with the interaction between WezTerm and tmux.

I don't have enough evidence to create a good bug report, and I WezTerm has its own terminal multiplexing server ("ssh domains"), so it's probably not important enough to fix anyway. I don't want to install the WezTerm multiplexing server everywhere, and tmux is pretty much on all of the places that I ssh into already.

Other than that, WezTerm is great!

evandrofisico• 2 years ago

It's not tmux specific, i have had the same issue and for me, it was a showstopper.

hrez4• 2 years ago

It's not just you. I gave up on Wez for that reason and after my comment on https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4706 was ignored and issue autoclosed.

drdaeman• 2 years ago

It is not performing well for me, tends to just freeze for a few seconds when switching tabs after some time. No idea why (large scrollback is my only guess, but I'm not sacrificing that) and how to diagnose this.

I switched to Kitty, and while it has its share of issues, at least it works.

progbits• 2 years ago

My main pain point switching between work macbook and personal linux machines is the shortcuts. The macos configuration options are limited and require various hacks, and while I could configure things on linux to match I really don't like the macos shortcuts. So I end up with a weird mix and each time I switch keep pressing the wrong keys all the time...

Anyone found a good setup that works for them?

gaws2• 2 years ago

Look into using Keyboard Maestro and configuring shortcuts exclusive to Wezterm.

hughesjj4• 2 years ago

Also it's well tested on all three. One look at wez' repo vs the rest in terms of GitHub actions, issues, and documentation was all the convincing I needed back in like 2019. Haven't turned back since. Heck it even supports tabbing out of the box!

It's the first terminal to truly replace urxvt for me in terms of support and speed. Before I was running termite and kept urxvt as a backup for some odd situations where termite got buggy.

benreesman• 2 years ago

Hardware accelerated ligatures. QED.

steelbrain• 2 years ago

Going to echo some of the thoughts of sibling posters. I'd been an iTerm2 user since I first started using macOS nearly ten years ago.

I had really started to feel it slow down lately. It hit the breaking point when I was cmd-tab-ing and found myself waiting for more than a second just for the terminal to appear.

Looked around, evaluated a couple alternatives and none of them quite fit my taste. One terminal required an account/login to operate, which is a big no IMO, another was written in {Java,Type}Script so simple commands like `yes` would break it due to the async nature of streams in node.js.

I really like WezTerm so far. It's quite fast, very much configurable and comes with the theme I was configuring with iTerm2 out of the box (OneDark (base16)).

My only trouble with it was in the beginning when I had to add the configs for cmd-left and cmd-right in lua config, I really hoped they'd be in there with the defaults.

elashri• 2 years ago

One terminal required an account/login to operate, which is a big no IMO, another was written in {Java,Type}Script so simple commands like `yes` would break it due to the async nature of streams in node.js.

Let me guess, that's wrap and Tabby or extraterm respectively?

throwaway11943• 2 years ago

Does anyone know what the default colorscheme is on wezterm?

ishaanbahal3• 2 years ago

Thank you for this write-up! Going to copy a couple of things to my config. TIL, Wezterm has a command palette.

Wezterm with Zellij becomes amazing with how it just simply gets out of the way, even lets you remove window decorations entirely. I've heard Wezterm has a multiplexer too, but just haven't tried it.

Terretta• 2 years ago

I've heard Wezterm has a multiplexer too, but just haven't tried it.

You're in luck, the last half the post is about that.

ishaanbahal3• 2 years ago

Did go through it, bookmarked for use, that's how I learned about the command palette, just hard to break the habit of using zellij, that too with tmux mode :D

globular-toast• 2 years ago

A problem I have when I see stuff like this with tabbed interfaces, splitting etc. is it's all at the wrong level of abstraction and compensating for a hopelessly deficient window manager. If you use a window manager like sway then you can layout tabs, splits etc. to your heart's content for any type of window you like. You don't need a terminal emulator to do this for you.

Given that I do already use a window manager like sway, is there much else worthwhile compared to any other terminal emulator?

eredengrin3• 2 years ago

Wezterm has built in ssh support where if you open a wezterm ssh window to a remote host and then open new tabs/splits within that window, the new tabs/splits are added as part of the existing ssh session automatically. It also allows you to host the session on the remote machine (kind of like tmux) and when you connect you get back all your previous tab/split organizations. From that perspective it can make sense to have the terminal own the layout organization.

binary1322• 2 years ago

In my experience Wez has been shockingly responsive to GitHub issues and usually fixes things (if they’re actually wrong) within a day or two. I’ve only found one or two minor quibbles involving modifier keys over SSH and overall the functionality is basically perfect for my needs. Plus it’s nice and fast.

(Former avid Alacritty user but needed better modifier support for remote emacs.)

bbkane4• 2 years ago

Yes!! I opened an issue ( https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4917 ), and not only did he answer it and my side question, he merged the two PRs I made to fix it super quickly!

yonatan80702• 2 years ago

A bit of a tangent, 3 days ago I opened a small issue with RiMusic, not only did the maintainer reply within a few hours, they implemented the feature I requested and it is already in the F-Droid build running on my device

hrez4• 2 years ago

I didn't have as positive experience. Granted I commented on a closed issue. In any case it was closed as "won't do" and my comment was ignored. I didn't feel like opening a new issue for the same that was already dismissed. https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4706

naikrovek2• 2 years ago

Yeah Wez is limited by tmux behavior. If tmux breaks up one line into many, wezterm can’t undo that.

Wes is right about wezterm domains though. The native domains feature and pane support I think will meet the needs of most.

eredengrin3• 2 years ago

The way you phrase that makes it sound like you had a negative experience, was that your intention? For all we know he didn't even see it, there's thousands of issues and PRs and it's not like this is his full time job, so missing a message sounds like a pretty expected and neutral interaction to me. There's a reason they used the word "shockingly" to describe his response time, it's because it's amazing that Wez can respond to even a fraction of all the messages as quickly as he does.

Also in case you wanted to bump up the priority of that bug, he does have github sponsors enabled.

nine_k• 2 years ago

Regarding remote Emacs: WezTerm allows to completely capture and redefine key combinations. There's no good way to send things like C-S-", the terminal protocol just does not support them. So I made WezTerm send "<f12> c s '" instead, and added extra bindings in Emacs. This F12 trick allowed me to send quite complex combos that terminal protocols can't support.

binary1322• 2 years ago

Nifty! Appreciate your sharing that. I’ve managed to work around the few annoyances with remote for the most part but I’ve also accepted mostly that it’s just not going to be quite the same. I guess this is one or two steps closer.

CafeRacer• 2 years ago

I have work to do! I won't drop everything right now to check it...

Okay, maybe for just a few minutes.

xrisk• 2 years ago

You can dump iterm2s config into a file and sync it to other machines.

Granted it’s not meant to be edited directly but rather via the GUI, but yeah it’s possible to persist it if you want.

kamikaz1k• 2 years ago

Every time I’ve tried to do that, it doesn’t carry over.

Does it support all the configurations?

rob74• 2 years ago

I originally installed WezTerm because I switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu and wanted some of the features of Konsole (infinite scrollback, searching the scrollback) without actually installing Konsole (I know you can install it under Gnome too, but it just felt... wrong). And yes, it instantly grew on me, although (as I can see from this article) I have barely scratched the surface of its configurability. My only complaint is that its many features are not really discoverable. Sure, the documentation is really good, and the author is very engaged and helpful, but... one example: I looked up how to select large blocks of text using just the keyboard, I did it once, said to myself "I have to remember this!", then promptly forgot it and now I'm back to selecting text with the mouse like an absolute noob because all in all for the few times I do this it's faster than googling that documentation page again...

(in case you're wondering, the page I mean is https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/copymode.html, not https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html, which sounds like what I was looking for, but is something completely different - also very handy and a great idea, but not what I was after)

bbkane4• 2 years ago

I keep my Wezterm config in a dotfiles repo and I keep notes like this in the README ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm ), precisely to find them easily later!

barnabee• 2 years ago

Quickselect mode is amazing though!

It's useful out of the box but the superpower is that you can customise the regexes it matches. I've added one that finds all the filenames output by 'eza --icons' (\p{Co} matches the icon) so I can instantly type (by using shift+the quickselect letters) any filename after doing an ls (aliased to eza).

ajaxnet• 2 years ago

A side question, why switching from Kubuntu ? Because I'm thinking to install it.

monzool2• 2 years ago

I am to understand that there is a way to do infinite scrollback and live searching the scrollback in WezTerm? I have not really found out how to do this like Konsole, and is the reason of often end up having a Konsole session running also. It is two incredible features when tailing live logs

alberth2• 2 years ago

OT: I'm most excited by Ghostty (created by the founder of HashiCorp).

https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh

lytedev• 2 years ago

What are you excited about concerning Ghostty? I revisit the project every once in a while, because I think Zig has a wonderful and bright future, but I don't think I could ever use a terminal emulator that isn't completely open-source. WezTerm has an _enormous_ leg up over Ghostty in this regard IMO.

alberth2• 2 years ago

Ghostty is still a private project. I plan to open source it one day and share it with more people but for now this is a private personal project.

https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

matricaria2• 2 years ago

Ghostty will be open source once it is stable enough.

matricaria2• 2 years ago

I love Ghostty. On my old MacBook, it was by far the fastest terminal emulator (yes, I tried all of them, also WezTerm and Alacritty). Now on my new Mac it is still the most beautiful terminal emulator.

lawn2• 2 years ago

It feels like I've been waiting for an invite a long time now. I'm eager to try it out.

Then again, I should probably try WezTerm first.

FL33TW00D• 2 years ago

WezTerm is just so much faster than iTerm2, wish I had switched sooner!

Video demonstrating the speedup: https://x.com/fleetwood___/status/1807772624518316495

abhinavk3• 2 years ago

Is it better in typing latency though?

hughesjj4• 2 years ago

..you have noticable latency when you type? I'm genuinely sorry, that would infuriate me.

Personally I don't notice any typing latency in wezterm. I have p10k as a zsh theme and not really any 'plugins' beyond git for the terminal and use neovim+ also pretty much just got and CoC for an editor. I don't notice any latency when typing and, while not instant, still sub 200ms startup latency.

rfoo• 2 years ago

No, and unlike the siblings I can actually feel it.

That being said, wezterm is about the only terminal I can use now (besides putty). I'm on a cursed setup, Windows with a Linux VM and whatever terminal I use it has to be able to directly ssh into the VM (NOT via ssh.exe), otherwise there's much worse latency/quirks due to stupid Windows conpty issues.

Currently it does not annoy me too much, but when I finally have time I think I'd try to fix it.

1-more• 2 years ago

Amen. My motivation for switching was that iTerm2 would hang forever after I hit one of my Rectangle/Spectacle shortcuts. Many whole seconds waiting for it to go through one of the transitions in the 1/3 -> 1/2 -> 2/3 screen-size cycle.

adem2• 2 years ago

I tried WezTerm on Windows because I was looking for a terminal with ligature support and lower input latency than Windows Terminal. Unfortunately, it still had higher input latency than cmd.exe. The only terminal with ligature support that comes close in terms of input latency is contour (https://contour-terminal.org/).

eviks3• 2 years ago

did you measure latency? Curious as to how big the difference is

adem2• 2 years ago

I can't provide you with numbers but back when I used Windows on my work machine, I recorded my screen + microphone input using OBS to compare they recorded keystroke sound and appearance of the character on my screen. I was able to confirm my suspicion in that WezTerm yielded higher input latency. This was especially noticeable when using helix inside of WSL - movement in normal mode would always sort of lag behind the keystrokes.

EDIT: Just installed in on my Mac and here, I can't notice any difference between kitty (my current input latency baseline) and WezTerm. Good stuff! Not sure how Windows fares nowadays, though.

bloopernova• 2 years ago

Oh, very cool that it uses Lua for its configuration. That opens up a massive potential for new behaviours and customization.

Emacs uses Lisp in a similar way. What other applications use a programming language for their configuration?

awesomelvin• 2 years ago

Not sure if it counts but the suckless project (e.g. st or dwm) use C (its source code) as config :)

lawn2• 2 years ago

Neovim is the obvious example here, also relying on Lua.

Neovim of course also supports Vimscript, although writing anything more complex is much nicer in Lua.

bbkane4• 2 years ago

NeoVim also uses Lua and I think nginx does too.

radlad• 2 years ago

awesome-wm!

kragen• 2 years ago

probably the most popular instances of this approach are firefox, chromium, and safari. the unix shell, godot, unity, unreal engine, truetype, and postscript are probably also worth a mention

kccqzy2• 2 years ago

XMonad (a window manager) uses Haskell.

weinzierl• 2 years ago

So many comments from people coming from iTerm. What do you have in your WezTerm config to make it more like iTerm?

spartanatreyu4• 2 years ago

As a fellow iterm2 refuge, here's my config:

https://gist.github.com/spartanatreyu/fe6d045c3113f27acaa509...

I added back the familiar option/cmd + arrow key navigation and cmd + click hyperlink behaviour.

There's also some tweaking to make it more similar to iterm's default behaviours (e.g. don't hide the mouse when you start typing).

And finally some personal visual tweaks which you can throw out and replace with your own.

linsomniac2• 2 years ago

I've been using wezterm for around a year, and sponsoring Wez on github, and it's been a fantastic terminal and he's a great developer. One of the things I love most about it, which the article mentions it is not going into, is the quick copy and other copy modes. I use them All. The. Time. C-S-Space and type the letters that appear next to the item you want to copy.

One big use case I have is: mosh+tmux-like functionality from my macos laptop to my work Linux machine. I always have a session running so I can do things on my work machine from my Mac. It gives a re-connectable session plus panes and tabs so I can do work when I'm away from my desk. It's top notch.

ursuscamp• 2 years ago

One really cool feature of the quick copy mode is that if you do the uppercase version of the letters it will automatically paste the value back into the terminal prompt.

linsomniac2• 2 years ago

Agreed, I use that for probably 80% of my copies. Also works in the regular select, if you "Y" instead of "y" it yanks and pastes.

Graziano_M• 2 years ago

Wow TIL about that QuickSelect. I will be using that a lot.

eviks3• 2 years ago

My favourite WezTerm feature is its use of Lua for defining config.

That's indeed one of its best features (despite the warts of the language) as you're not as limited in what you can do vs. the data serialization alternative

kelsey987654312• 2 years ago

I will literally switch OS to anything that can implement iTerm2's tmux integration.

jonhohle2• 2 years ago

I only use tmux on remote machines (because Terminal has all of the features I want and don’t need session management locally). Does anything integrate with remote tmux? It would be great to get native tabs for remote tmux windows.

kelsey987654312• 2 years ago

Yes, i literally sometimes need to manage dozens of machines at once, all with various tmux sessions monitoring tasks etc. being able to use the same keybinds for split pane, move between pane, smooth scrolling WITHOUT entering tmux curses based scrolling mode, and local buffering... number one reason i main macos after using linux for decades.

EDIT: the command is `tmux -uCC a` to connect to a tmux session, works locally and works over ssh. spawn the tmux session normally, disconnect, then connect via command mode for best results. you can still spawn a new one with just `tmux -uCC` but i have found i can get some issues when i spawn it in command mode vs attach in command mode.

galkk• 2 years ago

Iterm2, as parent mentioned.

Run tmux -CC on your remote server in your iterm2 and you’ll get native windows for tmux panels

E39M5S62• 2 years ago

I wrote https://github.com/zdykstra/tmuxc as an alternative implementation of iTerm2's tmux integration. It's terminal agnostic; it just runs a command for each terminal. Depending on the terminal you use, you could probably make it spawn each tmux pane into a dedicated tab.

It's very much designed and built for my specific needs on my specific desktop environments, so there's no promises that it'll work for you well ... or at all.

dmd3• 2 years ago

The one thing that keeps me on iTerm2 is Edit->Selection Respects Soft Boundaries.

"When enabled, vertical lines of pipe characters | will be interpreted as pane dividers (as in vim or emacs) and selection will wrap at them."

(For me, it's selecting text in irc.)

https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/596

jph• 2 years ago

Yes 100%. This is a superb UI/UX feature once you see it in action.

nixosbestos• 2 years ago

Meanwhile zellij just supports this natively if your terminal supports the right OSC thingy. Which it does if you're in this thread.

edit: rough, my bad. missed the via "in irc" part.

dmd3• 2 years ago

Reread my comment.

ledauphin• 2 years ago

i've been using iterm for... years and had never noticed this setting. Which is a killer feature for my use of emacs.

thanks!

dmd3• 2 years ago

(self-reply) This is basically the Microsoft Word bloat problem. NOBODY needs all the features, but everyone has 10 niche features they want, and nobody wants the same 10. So to get 10 niche features, you accept bloat.

yonatan80702• 2 years ago

That sounds incredible, is there any terminal that supports it on Linux?

zoidb• 2 years ago

Nice to see wezterm on the frontpage! For anyone giving it try beware that link detection doesn't work super well for links containing a `)` character which is something you run into frequently on markdown documents. More info in https://github.com/wez/wezterm/pull/4212 which has a workaround.

roydivision• 2 years ago

I recently changed from Alacritty to WezTerm due to bugs in the former and I don't have any complaints so far. It is part of my daily professional workflow, works well with Tmux, under WSL. Great piece of software.

robinsonrc2• 2 years ago

I went in the other direction and use Zellij for multiplexing. It works well for me, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the Ghostty public beta to see how that compares. Great to have all these good options.

CoolCold• 2 years ago

for myself, I couldn't find good reasons to keep using WezTerm vs Windows Terminal - not saying WezTerm is not capable terminal, of course.

skim• 2 years ago

Wez is coming out with a book too on systems programming in Rust.

https://leanpub.com/sysprog

test1235• 2 years ago

I've been using wezterm on windows for a while and still not managed to work out how to close a split pane. Is this a bug?

andrewfromx• 2 years ago

Things I noticed using it:

!= goes to weird ≠ utf8 char. I like != better!

Command-K clears the scroll back but NOT the screen.

Updates:

config.harfbuzz_features = {"calt=0", "clig=0", "liga=0"}

Command-L

kokada2• 2 years ago

I also recently switched to WezTerm because it is the only terminal that seems to work cross-platform that is also well supported in Nix/nixpkgs. Before I was using Kitty in NixOS and iTerm2 in macOS, but having one configuration for both OS is good.

P.S.: I am temporary back to Kitty in NixOS because I recently switched from Sway to Hyprland and the current release of WezTerm seems to be having some issues in Hyprland. But will switch back once this issue is solved, I know it is fixed in the main branch for example, but I would prefer to use nixpkgs cache instead of building it from source.

Macha• 2 years ago

Kitty works on macOS too?

kokada2• 2 years ago

Yes, but when I did the migration Kitty wasn't supported in macOS in nixpkgs (i.e.: nobody did the package integration). Now looking at the package it looks like it should work, but I now think WezTerm being superior in at least a few things (e.g.: the Lua configuration file is definitely nice).

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

Would like to switch from Tabby on Windows to WezTerm, but would wish the Win installer would setup WSL2 so it just works. For now I don't want to get into learning a Lua config.

nusl• 2 years ago

Windows' terminal has integration directly with WSL2; https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

vijucat3• 2 years ago

If I'm fiddling with the terminal or the font, I know it's because I'm procrastinating. I've trained myself to quickly recognize such side-quests and feel a quick punch of hormonal urgency, which helps me get back to work (with mintty and Consolas). You don't need the bells and whistles.

qweqwe14• 2 years ago

This, unironically, is entirely correct. Some people spend way too much time configuring stuff that doesn't matter.

"If you've never spent hours ricing your OS, you have no heart. If you still do, you have no brain."

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

That's correct if it's always or very often your M.O., but if you rarely mess with it? How about if you spend some time fixing any annoyances that have accrued over time thanks to "involuntary unpaid vacation time"?

For example, I recently reduced my terminal startup time to 1/3 what it was by putting in some optimizations. I'll be able to benefit from that for basically forever.

... Ah, you develop on Windows? This tracks, then... All productivity, no aesthetics >..<

vijucat3• 2 years ago

As an aside, I'm surprised how Apple fans think they're the one with the aesthetics advantage when their Lord and Master allowed them to change the color of their menu bar in...2023? :)

alskdj21• 2 years ago

As a neovim user, wezterm's lua config was a welcome surprise. Imo, its best feature is its command palette (Shift+Ctrl+P). Tremendously helps when you're just getting started. It has also a superb font-related configurations. I do hope I could map specific Unicode codepoints to a particular font, as is the case with kitty.

In terms of use-case, I just disable all its keybindings and use it as a tmux terminal. I admit I didn't look for solutions, but I just can't go away from tmux's session restoration capabilities.

selectnull• 2 years ago

Like a few people in this thread, I was a decade long user of iTerm2. Can't really remember what was the reason to research other terminals, but I did and among those I tried, WezTerm was the clear winner.

I vaguely remember my main requirement was being able to configure CMD+D and CMD+SHIFT+D as split panes vertically and horizontally as I wasn't willing to retrain my fingers to learn new keystrokes for that. Within a version of two after I switched (back then, those were weeks or less apart), all my complaints were resolved and I never looked back.

My config is fairly minimal, but perfect for my needs. What else can one want?

anothername12• 2 years ago

What are you all doing that requires such fine grain selection of a terminal?

I spend a lot of time in a terminal and just use whatever’s there. Terminal.app or gnome-terminal. Before that it was xterm. Perhaps the only customization is modifier key on Mac as meta.

kccqzy2• 2 years ago

At a previous employer (Google) I really enjoyed using iTerm2, especially its tmux integration (`tmux -CC attach`) and shell integration (the terminal being aware of shell prompts and shell commands and outputs so it can do something intelligent).

After switching employers I no longer have a Mac to run iTerm2 in. So I decided to simply reduce the number of apps I require by running my terminal inside Emacs. The emacs-libvterm project is excellent. These days I no longer need a terminal emulator app.

terraplura2• 2 years ago

Been a long time user of Alacritty but recently switched to WezTerm. Set up was super quick and having graduated control over opacity and blur was brilliant. Also love that it supports Font Ligatures.

Btw one gotcha on macOS during setup is that the left Option/Alt key does not emit the usual special character mappings, but the right Option key does. You can configure that too!

Cheers Wez!

nebben642• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Just curious, what made you switch from Alacrity? (I was also debating it vs. WezTerm)

terraplura2• 2 years ago

Apart from the granular blur control. It was mainly the ligatures support, Alacritty’s developer doesn’t seem too keen on it. And it seems to be the only terminal that renders the ANSI blinking escape code properly (although I don’t think it distinguishes rapid and slow blink). I think it’s a cool feature!

Unlike OP, I hardly use WezTerms features. I have hidden the tabs away and just use the old vim+tmux combo. So my config is just 25 lines. There was no weird colour interaction issue that alacrity+vim+tmux had (and there is a famous gist for). All which is to say I didn’t have to dive deep to migrate.

theusus• 2 years ago

Even though Wezterm has lots of options but it's slow compared to Kitty and maybe even Windows terminal

Ringz2• 2 years ago

Yep. Tried Wez and switched back to Kitty because it’s much faster.

lambdaba3• 2 years ago

on which platform?

WD-42• 2 years ago

It’s a great terminal but still a bit warty on Linux/wayland. Unfortunately Wez is on OSX, I assume.

9front• 2 years ago

WezTerm is available for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD also. See https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/installation.html

dgacmu• 2 years ago

Ah, rats. It looks nice but to save others a bit of searching, if broadcasting to multiple panes is a requirement for you (something I use often in iterm2), it's not yet supported and not planned for support: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/2658

eredengrin3• 2 years ago

Wez left the issue open and said "I personally have no plans to implement this any time soon.", so I have to imagine he's open to PRs. He just has other things to spend his own time on.

eigenvalue• 2 years ago

I'm looking forward to the eventual release of the new terminal that Mitchell Hashimoto has been working on for fun for a few year, Ghostty. From what he has shared online so far, it looks really awesome and well designed.

auditor_3d• 2 years ago

I have tried so many I can't count. I have settled on one that seems to be not as well known but should be. Black Box Terminal. It checks all kinds of great boxes for me, I love it.

https://github.com/yonasBSD/blackbox-terminal

ivanjermakov• 2 years ago

What "great boxes" do you have that more popular terminal emulators are missing?

jpeeler• 2 years ago

Can lazy internet help me replicate kitty's word selection (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/) in WezTerm? I believe one would just have to adjust the config for "quick select": https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/quick_selec...

myst2• 2 years ago

Am I a rare one being happy with Terminal.app?

robinsonrc2• 2 years ago

I was until I started needing things like true colour support and was forced into trying other options. But if you haven’t noticed anything missing or not working with software that you use then Terminal.app is a fine choice

abathur• 2 years ago

I'm pretty happy with it.

I try alts when they come up since I might like to use the same thing on macOS and Linux, but I've yet to try one that both has the right features and doesn't feel sluggish.

Myrmornis2• 2 years ago

It doesn’t support terminal hyperlinks, which are produced by many tools nowadays (rg, fd, ls, delta).

myst2• 2 years ago

I have no idea what you are talking about.

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

Nice! I've been using Wezterm for a couple years.

I use the Embark color theme, which I don't see represented on the wezterm themes page: https://github.com/dmshvetsov/wezterm-embark-theme

I also like a slowly-blinking block cursor, a specific font, ligatures etc. Feel free to raid my config: https://github.com/pmarreck/dotconfig/blob/yolo/wezterm/wezt...

I love that I can use the same config on macOS and Linux as I use both machines often.

core_dumped• 2 years ago

I’m glad WezTerm is getting the attention it deserves. I just wish he’d change the icon though… it needs a facelift!

michael_michael• 2 years ago

Yeah. I wish subtle design cues didn't turn folks off from useful software. That said, when I was test driving terminals a few months ago, I saw WezTerm and just skipped it because the main image shows the opacity-enabled terminal with a Cyberpunk image in the background, and that just seemed…amateurish? Dunno.

This article is convincing me to give it a second look.

ObscureMind• 2 years ago

https://github.com/mikker/wezterm-icon

junon• 2 years ago

Big Wezterm fanboy here.

tracker1• 2 years ago

I'll need to look at it again. Mostly been using Tabby lately, which I like aspects of, but it can be sluggish. I really like the new Microsoft Terminal for Windows, but it's Windows only, unfortunately and I mostly use Linux and Mac.

I looked at WezTerm a long while ago, didn't even realize I'd already had it starred. Will try it out again soon. It's just another one of those things, that I prefer to use the same applications (if I can) on all the platforms I use.

el_memorioso• 2 years ago

I used WezTerm for a while and loved it, but then I discovered it had some strange interactions with other programs that use the GPU or OpenGL. In my case, when running WezTerm, the robotics simulation tool Gazebo Classic [0] would only launch properly 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. The rest of the time the simulation appeared to start, but no display ever came up and the program eventually segfalted. I thought this was a Gazebo problem, since it is a bit touchy, but switching to another GPU-accelerated terminal like Kitty or Alacritty solved the problem. I guess the lesson being, if your GL program is misbehaving when launching from WezTerm, try another terminal to see if that doesn't solve the problem.

[0] https://classic.gazebosim.org/

aftbit• 2 years ago

I really _want_ to like WezTerm but the font rendering just looks bad compared to Alacritty. I understand that this is a very personal feeling and plenty of people like the WezTerm way better... but not me.

The author is not interested in trying to fix this issue, which is totally fine, as they point out font rendering is very subjective, but I'm also not willing to use a terminal that looks worse, even though I like many other things about it better.

https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/5331

hughesjj4• 2 years ago

Oh man, fonts are fun. Ironically I moved off of alacrity and on to wezterm for font rendering reasons (p10k+patched nerd fonts), but that was pre pandemic

taejavu2• 2 years ago

I’m using patched nerd fonts seemingly without issue on alacritty, were your problems specifically with p10k?

taejavu2• 2 years ago

Oh wow I was expecting it to be slightly worse, like the subpixel rendering wasn’t quite right. But that is _bad_, to the extent it looks like a totally different font. Dealbreaker.

duskwuff• 2 years ago

I gave WezTerm a spin and it had some showstopper bugs rendering my preferred font (including a vertical offset on "b" to the extent it looks like "h"). Something's definitely not right here.

spartanatreyu4• 2 years ago

I'd probably try a few fonts first just to see if it's an issue with rendering, or if the font itself is problematic since sometimes it's the font's fault itself when it's being used in a different environment. (font internals are a crazy rabbit hole to dive down)

Besides, if you're trying another terminal it's also a great excuse to try other things too!

I'm a fan of tools like these where you compare a series of option pairs (in this case font pairs) in succession until it spits out your most preferred option: https://www.codingfont.com/

tambourine_man• 2 years ago

This looks very interesting. I’ll have to look at it closer later.

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html

Thanks for posting

alexcaza• 2 years ago

As a fellow iTerm2 to Wezterm convert this hit home. There’s loads of useful stuff in here, too! Thanks for the write up. I particularly like the projects setup. I built Weztermocil to achieve something similar that uses itermocil’s configs since that’s what we use at work.

https://github.com/alexcaza/weztermocil

robxorb• 2 years ago

Just tried it. I liked how easy it was to set up colours/fonts etc, using the config file.

But I hit a snag. On macOS, it's standard that in any text window, to select everything for copying, you hit Command-a.

But Command-a in wezterm just printed an "a" character. What?

I spent a while looking in the docs and issues, but couldn't figure out how to Select All.

I don't think I should have to justify it, but in case someone's wondering - it's useful if you want to search or parse an entire Terminal session using some other process (eg, grep), or edit it, or just persist it for example.

Regardless of why, "Select All" is such a standard function it felt quite strange it wasn't suported out of the box.

spartanatreyu4• 2 years ago

Select all seems a bit risky in a terminal because it could contain way more information than you'd expect.

e.g. I want to `cat` a file to make sure i've got the right one, but I accidentally cat a full 1gb sql backup rather than the tiny 50 line script I was expecting. Sometime later, I try to select all, copy, switch application, paste for some reason but now I'm stuck waiting for 1gb to copy over

Personally I'm a bit more cautious about copying from a terminal.

Either way if that's what you really want to do, you can check the repo to see how other people scripted it into wezterm:

https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/2026

javierhonduco• 2 years ago

Haven’t had the chance to play with WezTerm just yet but wanted to share that the author is an incredibly smart, friendly, and humble.

Had the opportunity to work on a project together at work some years back and I can only aspire to be 1/10th as good of an engineer as him. A true hacker.

WuxiFingerHold• 2 years ago

I had a bit FOMO not using TMUX. But WezTerm and a handful of keybindings for creating tabs, panes, new windows and moving around solved that for me.

mianos• 2 years ago

It seems great but it's unusable to me as it does not support any port forwarding and my connections always go through a few jump boxes.

The built in multiplexing is like magic.

nopcode• 2 years ago

Why do people mod their terminal prompt to display the current date/time?

It feels like one of these "ricer" things like opening 9 terminals just to run cmatrix and screenfetch.

andrei_says_• 2 years ago

I’ve been using western but unable to search my command line history or find the relevant documentation.

Ideally fuzzy search of just the commands I’ve entered and not the full scroll history as some results take many hundreds of lines.

Is there a wezterm community where I can ask this and similar questions?

theshrike79• 2 years ago

I really seem to like software that's configured with Lua.

It looks nice just as a basic setup (key = value type stuff), but you can do really complex dynamic configurations with it (like the dark-mode config in the linked article).

Hammerspoon is another, you can do so many things with it - I replicated most of Rectangle/Manget with Hammerspoon+Lua myself and now I can do the minor tweaks I couldn't do with the pre-packaged apps.

monzool2• 2 years ago

I’ve have been using wezterm for a couple of years now i guess. I am super satisfied with it, and show my appreciation by being a github sponsor. One thing that I really appreciate is, that when I at $work have to use MacOS, I can bring my configuration with me and have the same experience as on my linux box. Other projects do provide that also of course. I did try Alacritty, but that was way to unstable. Kitty have a lot of good stuff going on as well, but it was indeed the lua configuration options that made me pick wezterm. I think the only things I’m missing from Konsole is the infinite scroll buffer and the regex search overlay (continuous search without entering a special copy/search mode)…

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

serious question: why aren't you guys doing all the extra feature stuff in zellij and not having to care so much about what term you are using?

Okay, I Like WezTerm

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