Terminals, Several

There are two ways to look at terminals. For many a terminal's a terminal and they all do the same thing, others like to experiment with them, try different ones and do all sorts of, often pointless, configuring and fondling.

Sadly, I fall into the latter category.

Warp, Alacritty, Ghostty, WezTerm and the XFCE terminal.

Apparently, I have seven terminal emulators installed, the five above along with Kitty and Xterm. I do switch my default from time to time -- but this seems a little much. They really do all do the same thing.

I'm going to stick with three that I view as contenders; Warp, Alacritty and Ghostty,

Right now, Warp is set as my default  Super+Enter terminal. I installed it to play with the AI and as it turns out, it's a pretty cool even without the (paid) AI. 

My only hitch was getting it to open where I wanted at the size I wanted. Warp wasn't respecting the configured settings and always defaulted to a stupid square box always on top. I eventually worked around it with a window rule in my awesome wm config and this likely wouldn't affect most people.

Yeah, it's fast but they all are pretty quick. 

At least it seems that way, but let's find out. I added a line to my .zshrc and piped fortune, cowsay and lolcat together to run at launch and timed it.

Warp running fortune | cowsay -r | lolcat

Above is the Warp terminal -- since it's my default we'll use if for a baseline. 

Let's check Alacritty.

Slighly faster, but we're talking milliseconds.

And finally, the last of our big three, following the 'tty' naming trend, Ghostty

Last, but not least, Ghostty.

Ghostty, surprisingly was fastest for this silly little thing. 

I have a text copy of the Bible, lets run and time cat on it.

Ghostty, Alacritty and Warp, respectively.

Ghostty and Alacritty are essentially tied, but Warp took twice as long with half the CPU load. I doubt it much matters, twice as long is an extra tenth second. Then again, that CPU usage might matter with long running or CPU intensive processes

But let's be real, nobody is ever going to notice the difference between any of these and it all comes down to other features and preferences and they all have a ton. Ghostty comes with a slew of themes, Alacritty has a dead simple one file config and Warp is what the cool kids are using and fixed some scripts I didn't know were broken. 

And the winner is... whatever you want to use. These are all fantastic and a vast improvement over what ships with most distros and there is no wrong answer. You can make any of them -- except maybe Warp, the config file doesn't seem to do much -- look and feel the way you want.

Myself, Ghostty is looking good for next week. 

Warp, I'll see you when my free tokens renew.