Ter­mi­nals

Most of these em­u­la­tors go in the S-tier for me. The only one that I find a little laggy is iTerm2, but it's still a fea­tureful ter­minal with great MacOS sup­port. Also, ad­mit­tedly, I haven't used Warp ter­minal ex­ten­sively. That one has a lot of promise with its modern AI fea­tures, though. Take my rat­ings with a grain of salt— I'm def­i­nitely pri­or­i­tizing per­for­mance above other fac­tors.

Alacritty

Joe Wilm (in­di­vidual)
https://​alacritty.org/

This was my main ter­minal for a long time. I stopped and switched to WezTerm for un­der­curl and lig­a­ture sup­port. It's heckin' fast.

• Zippy AF
• No of­fi­cial lig­a­ture sup­port
• Rust

Ghostty

Mitchell Hashimoto (in­di­vidual)
https://​ghostty.org/

This is the newest of the bunch. It was cre­ated by Mitchell Hashimoto (the person be­hind Va­grant and HashiCorp) and has been hyped up— for good reason. I've been using it as my daily driver for a while now, and I love it. Check out my ghostty KB page for de­tails on in­stal­la­tion and con­fig­u­ra­tion.

• Zippy AF
• Zig
• Lig­a­tures (==>/!==)
• Un­der­curl
• Image sup­port (with +kitty image pro­tocol)
• Built-in shader sup­port
  • e.g., you can make the ter­minal look like a CRT mon­itor or en­able an an­i­mated cursor
• Built-in splits and tabs

iTerm2

Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion, Inc. (com­pany)
https://​iterm2.com/

This em­u­lator has a lot of con­fig­u­ra­tion op­tions with na­tive MacOS sup­port. It can feel a little laggy once you start using the faster ter­mi­nals.

• Fast, but not Alacritty or Ghostty fast
• In­te­grates seam­lessly with MacOS
• Built-in splits and tabs

Kitty

Kovid Goyal (in­di­vidual)
https://​sw.kovid­goyal.net/​kitty/

I used Kitty for a short time, but I might have to re­visit it later. It is zippy— but per­haps still not as zippy as Ghostty or Alacritty. An­other cool fea­ture is image sup­port and mul­tiple font sizes!

• Fast
• Built-in Neo­vide -like cursor an­i­ma­tions
• Built-in image sup­port
• Built-in splits

Warp

Warp (com­pany)
https://​www.warp.dev/

I haven't used Warp ex­ten­sively, but the con­cept is re­ally ex­citing— built-in AI helpers for coding.

• Rust
• Built-in splits
• In­te­grated AI tools like LLM chat

WezTerm

Wez Fur­long (in­di­vidual)
https://​wez­fur­long.org/​wezterm/​index.html

WezTerm was my daily driver for a long time. As a Neovim user, I love the Lua con­fig­u­ra­tion. I would be using it still if Ghostty wasn't so damn fast.

• Fast, but still not Alacritty or Ghostty fast
• Rust (con­fig­ured in Lua)
• Built-in splits and tabs
• Lig­a­tures (==>/!==)
• Un­der­curl