Question: if I don't use TUIs or millions of lines of scrolling text, what am I missing by not using these newer terminal implementations? I use mintty on Windows and am pretty happy with it.
For me is the ability to maintain the same keyboard workflow, no matter if I’m dealing with files or terminal (switching buffers, navigating/searching/selecting/copying/pasting text, etc.), I get to keep the same set of shortcuts and mental model. And i get to do some small automation on top of it with elisp, which I already do for the rest of my editor anyway.
Exactly as you say, the greatest difference with the recent generation of video terminal emulators that use the GPU through OpenGL or the like, is the much greater rendering speed, which becomes very noticeable with millions of lines of scrolling text, especially if you use high-resolution monitors.
Unfortunately, millions of lines of scrolling text are no longer unusual, especially when you frequently compile big software projects. The use of high-resolution monitors has also been normal for many years.
Instant window rendering is addictive, so now I would never return from a fast terminal emulator like ghostty to an older video terminal emulator. The last terminal emulator that I had been using before ghostty was kitty, which was also pretty fast in comparison with traditional terminal emulators, but I like ghostty more.
Honestly not sure. I used ghosty and others for awhile but had continuous issues of it not passing a compatible term variable so a lot of tuis would break.
This is normally a problem only when connecting to a remote computer through ssh, if you have not installed there the terminfo entry for ghossty or kitty or whatever recent video terminal emulator you are using.
If you do not want to or you cannot install the terminfo data, there is the easy workaround to put in your shell initialization script on the remote computer something like "export TERM=xterm-256color".
Ghostty aims to be completely compatible with xterm, so everything should work fine after setting thus TERM, only the newer features of ghostty will not be available.
Just want to add that we have the same feature in Ghostel.
As it copies stuff to a remote host, automatic ssh injection is disabled by default but you can enable it by setting `ghostel-tramp-shell-integration` to true.
