Trying Wezterm From Kitty

When my friend Seth told me he was trying Wezterm, I paid attention.

I've been using Kitty as my terminal for at least five years. I honestly didn't have much of a reason to change, but I trust Seth so I dug into the docs.

I'm still a weirdo when it comes to modern terminals: I use none of the nifty tab and window features because I mostly use tmux. Therefore I didn't read much about Wezterm's session and pane features, but they seem up to snuff. I require a very minimal UI, fast refresh and response rate, and plaintext config.

The Lua API is expressive and very complete with good documentation. I was able to find all the random features I cared about and set them easily because Wezterm live reloads its own config! No more making a config file change and wondering what changed. Very handy for debugging colors and such.

Speaking of colors, Wezterm prepackages my favorite color scheme and font which means that cross platform configuration is much easier and has no dependencies. It even has fallback fonts for emojis and NerdFont icons so you don't have to run a font patch.

Wezterm supplies a patched terminfo supporting curl underlines and italics to which I've become accustomed. I just made a small Makefile update to ensure that it gets auto installed.

I'm still exploring all the features. I keep finding really nice things to play with like record to asciicast and replay and custom URL handlers for clicking on ticket references.

I'm trying Wezterm as my daily driver for a bit. Live editing the config is quite pleasant, and bundling the color and font with the terminal means that getting my dev environment aesthetics in linux should be much easier… and there's one more feature I'm quite excited about that deserves it's own post.