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Comment by brcmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

What's better, iTerm2 or Ghostty?

what makes foot interesting? i don't see anything that stands out in the list of features.

why would you want your terminal to be interesting??? it's a substrate -- it just has to work seamlessly, and it just works without trying to be anything besides a terminal.

interesting in the sense of "why should i bother switching?". the default terminal is good enough. what great features does foot have that make it worth switching? what does it do better than other terminals. i didn't see anything in the feature list that sounded useful to me.

incidentally i just discovered that my default terminal does not support copying the tmux selection into the desktop clipboard. so now i am going to switch to a terminal that does support that.

I'd have thought that would be tmux's job, not the terminal's.

iTerm2 has way more features and configuration options

Ghostty is simpler and faster

What's better? Only works for some or works for anyone?

What's better, an apple or an orange?

Depends.

My grandma uses those!

I used iTerm2 until I noticed that Ghostty’s New Tab opens at the current working directory.

Haven’t gone back since.

You can configure iterm2 to do whatever you want in new tabs or panes. This feature has been available for over a decade.

I have it reuse the same directory in a new pane. And my home directory in a new tab.

You can set that in iterm 2. I've had it that way for ages

Oh right, it didn’t work for me because it depends on edits to my shell config files that didn’t work in my setup.

I suppose my accolade is that Ghostty just does what I want without hunting through config screens and managing file edits.

> it depends on edits to my shell config files

No, it doesn't.

What you're describing is a Gnome Terminal issue.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697475

But OSC 7 is a standard supported across virtually all widely used terminal emulators anyway, so configuring your shell to emit it is a sensible thing to do regardless.

https://ghostty.org/docs/vt/osc/7

Hah, I actually just switched to Ghostty and had to turn that feature off. Yay for configuration.

I think Ghostty is great for the most part but I keep going back to iTerm2, personally.

iTerm just feel less buggy. For example I was running Claude in a container the other day and the slash command complete wasn’t rendering properly with Ghostty but worked perfectly fine with iTerm.

I want to switch to Ghostty because I prefer how simple Ghostty is overall and I think the project itself is very cool and an important piece of software (libghostty) but it doesn’t quite get there for _for my use cases_.

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