In 2025, what features do you want in a terminal emulator? (that currently aren't widely available or at all)
I'll start: After switching to Neovide from the terminal for Neovim, I got really hooked on the animated cursor and smooth scrolling (links to Neovide's features page). It wasn't until 2 months ago when the earlier was added to Kitty. I did so much overthinking about which terminal to use, and realized that I wouldn't (and don't) use most of the features provided by ones like iTerm and Kitty, though I picked the later. I was pleasantly surprised to see it added, even if it could use more work to make long smooth cursor animations like Neovide. The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can't believe there are no modern terminals with it.
(Somewhat) Side note: At this point many users realized that Ghostty got over-hyped, here is Mitchell Hashimoto's (dev of Ghostty) thoughts:
https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 – Mitchell HashimotoI didn't anticipate the hype. Some people think I am lying when I say this. I'm not. I'm not so naive to think that private betas and exclusive access don't generate hype in principle. But I didn't think many people at all would be interested in a terminal emulator. I thought I was building boring software for a niche audience. No hype! But I was wrong, and the consequences were real. People were frustrated that they couldn't get in. People felt left out. People felt like I was being fake to generate hype. The waitlist grew larger than I was comfortable allowing in (given my prior stated priorities). I'm sorry about that. All I can say is that I didn't intend for this to happen. I ramped up beta invites to try to get as many people in as I felt comfortable with (well, a bit beyond that). We ended the beta at around 5,000 users in a Discord of 28,000 at the time. Not quite the percentage of access I wanted for people but more than I could handle.
...One more negative aspect of the hype is the expectation of Ghostty being revolutionary. It is and it isn't. Ghostty has different goals and tradeoffs than other terminals. For those looking for those properties, Ghostty is a breath of fresh air and does things that no other terminal does. But for others, it's just a terminal. And that's okay. I hope you find a terminal that works for you and I don't claim that Ghostty is the end all be all of terminals.
None. As far as I’m concerned, terminal emulators reached feature completion twenty years ago. I just use whatever default emulator comes with an operating systems without giving it a second thought, because they all do the job just fine these days.
Konsole has pretty much everything I want.
st) is acceptable if done in a reasonable way.I know this is not everyone's cup of tea but you asked what I want. And nowadays it's at least as much about do not wants as wants.
I briefly tried ghostty when it was going around earlier. Slow startup time (~250ms if I remember right), the gtk-4 dependency and some weird defaults like the client side decoration (which I gather can be turned off in config) made me pass on it for now but might take another look in a few months. It didn't seem particularly revolutionary to me either but there are plenty of much worse options out there too.
Honestly? I want my terminal emulator to leave me alone as much as possible. Set font, set colors, done. Everything else should be handled by the shell and terminal applications I'm using.
Horizontal Scroll
Rendering images. I want to use Alacritty as default terminal, but it does not support any image protocol. So previews look pixelated on Yazi because it falls back to some method that's probably not meant for images. For now, I use foot as default.
Crazy how a very light and minimalistic terminal can show an image but not a gpu-accelerated one.