November 3, 2025
Cursors align, comments don’t
State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
Ghostty and Kitty crowned; Apple Terminal dragged; WezTerm fans howl
TLDR: Ghostty and Kitty top the Unicode tests, while macOS’s Terminal limps in at 29th. The crowd fights over outdated testing, WezTerm’s spotlight, and a Sixel vs Kitty image protocol split—plus jokes about slow performance—because misaligned cursors and broken emoji make everyone cranky.
The latest terminal showdown anoints Ghostty and Kitty as Unicode royalty, and the crowd absolutely noticed. The article says these two handle tricky emoji and character width perfectly, while many rivals stumble. Cue the drama: WezTerm diehards lament the lack of love for WezTerm, and one commenter accuses the test of being outdated, calling it “four releases behind” and stuck on older graphics tech. Apple fans wince as macOS’s built‑in Terminal lands a bruising 29th place, prompting “is this thing on?” jokes.
Under the hood, the author’s tool prods terminals with text and control signals to see if cursors line up—because when guesses about character widths go wrong, your screen turns into emoji chaos. Ghostty, written from scratch, gets bonus applause for releasing a shared library that could let future terminals inherit those wins. Then the plot twist: Sixel vs Kitty images. One commenter pokes the bear—if Kitty’s image protocol is so great, why do we still have two rival standards? The performance table adds fuel: iTerm2 and Extraterm allegedly chug, and GNOME Terminal’s family crawls, spawning memes of hourglasses and snails. Meanwhile, a bold dream emerges: what if terminals just become mini‑GUIs with Markdown/HTML vibes? The crowd is split, but the comments are pure popcorn.
Key Points
- •The ucs-detect tool was expanded to automatically detect DEC Private Modes, sixel graphics, pixel size, and software versions.
- •ucs-detect verifies cursor positioning by comparing terminal-reported locations with Python wcwidth results, exposing Unicode width discrepancies.
- •Ghostty, released in 2025 by Mitchell Hashimoto and implemented in Zig, scored highest with thoroughly correct Unicode handling.
- •Kitty by Kovid Goyal scored similarly and, along with Ghostty, is the only terminal to correctly support Variation Selector 15.
- •Performance testing found several terminals slow; iTerm2 and Extraterm required reduced parameters, and GNOME Terminal/VTE derivatives took over five hours at low CPU.