WezTerm

Table of Contents

It’s not often that I actually bother with trying out new terminals. To me, a good terminal is simple, doesn’t really get in the way, and doesn’t really have to do very much. Largely, I’ve used Konsole, and have usually used urxvt when I’m not running a desktop environment. Not a lot of features, but usually I’m not looking for these kinds of features, either.

WezTerm Features
#

WezTerm actually has some prety cool features, that I haven’t seen in other terminal emulators. The biggest one for me is persistent multiplexing. This serves as a sort of alternative to GNU screen, or tmux. It comes with a major disadvantage - connecting requires WezTerm and can’t be done from any old terminal emulator. However, it supports restoring graphical elements like tabs, something just not possible with screen or tmux.

Another feature I love is the fact that the configuration file is a Lua script, and very flexible. And what’s more, you don’t have to restart the terminal just to change the configuration.

And, of course basically every terminal these days has this, but the color theme support is simple and there are a ton of themes to select from.

Example Configuration
#

local wezterm = require 'wezterm'
local config = wezterm.config_builder()

config.unix_domains = {
  {
    name = 'unix',
  },
}

config.color_scheme = 'MonaLisa'
config.font = wezterm.font('Mx437 Trident 9x16')
config.default_gui_startup_args = { 'connect', 'unix' }

return config

Disadvantages
#

There’s been discussion of implementing tmux control mode, essentially letting you connect to an existing tmux session. This would be great for people who aren’t allowed to or don’t want to install WezTerm on the remote end. However, it seems little progress has been made on this front.

I’ve experienced some glitchiness when running a MUD client, TinTin++ and setting the #split 1 line to give a one line input with a separator bar. Notably, it doesn’t use ncurses, and this could be a bug in TinTin++ or even a problem with my own configuration.