Hacker News

points by miroljub 4 days ago | 0 comments

It doesn't work on Windows. What are your favorite Windows alternatives?

Windows Terminal. I used to use things like Kitty but don't see a need these days.

Yep, I use the beta version of Windows Terminal, which fully supports Kitty protocols, but I'm still envious of people using Kitty directly or even Ghostty.

[–] tappaseater 4 days ago

Windows Terminal is surprisingly outstanding.

[–] mkhnews 4 days ago

It is pretty good. The font rendering isn't great tho, especially when window scaling is used.

[–] dsign 4 days ago

WezTerm has worked fine for me. Windows however has ConPTY which is better than what was before but still a nuisance if one whats to use advanced escape sequences and other things that modern terminals support.

[–] m000 4 days ago

I concur. WezTerm is my driver for the past 3-4 years. For anyone wishing to try it, make sure you grab a nightly build.

I wish there were regular official releases that would help it get more traction. Last official release is 2.5 years ago, despite continuing development. This could drive some people away. OTOH, maybe that's the point...

[–] gib444 4 days ago

> For anyone wishing to try it, make sure you grab a nightly

Might be helpful to explain why someone should run a nightly build of something as critical as a terminal :D

I'm running WezTerm stable currently, so am curious.

[–] m000 3 days ago

Users are encouraged to use the nightly:

> It may not be usable and the feature set may change, but since @wez uses this as a daily driver, its usually the best available version. [1]

Of course you don't need to install the new nightly on a daily basis. But running stable from early 2024 you're probably missing some (mostly invisible) improvements.

There was also a thread somewhere explaining why there won't be a new stable release soon. IIRC, it had to do with completing a list of tasks, some of which had some blockers outside the control of Wez. Unfortunately, I can't spot the thread.

[1] https://wezterm.org/changelog.html#continuousnightly

[–] marttt 3 days ago

I've been using Yori [1]. Not comparable at all to Kitty in terms of features, but a joy to use if you like a polished "Win2k feel" with only a handful of added unix-isms like decent autocomplete etc. The author's other projects might also be worth a look.

1: http://www.malsmith.net/yori/

[–] chii 4 days ago

It's nowhere as featureful as kitty, but i've been using cmder and it's good enough a replacement for the default windows terminal for daily use. But if you use powershell, i m not sure what a good replacement is (but it does work in cmder iirc).

https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.

[–] LelouBil 4 days ago

Honestly you don't need ConEmu (the terminal emulator part of cmder) anymore with the new Windows Terminal

[–] incognito124 4 days ago

My favorite Windows alternative is Linux, specifically Manjaro

[–] m000 4 days ago

[–] not_a9 4 days ago

Stencil’s Tern is extremely based, but it has a bunch more features.

[–] fernandotakai 4 days ago

i use alacritty on every single OS and i absolutely love it.

[–] mkhnews 4 days ago

I want to use Alacritty on Windows, but it still has a ctrl+alt+key issue due to some upstream winit issue. Other apps seemed to have worked that out in other ways tho. I thought the font rendering in Alacritty on Windows was the best, so I still hope one day its updated with a fix.

[–] antihero 4 days ago

Does GhosTTY work on windows?

[–] rmunn 4 days ago

Not yet, but there are several projects that exist to build it for Windows: https://wintty.io/ describes itself as "A native Windows terminal built on the Ghostty core" (i.e., wrapping libghostty in a Windows application), and is probably the one I'd start with. There's also https://noctty.com/ which has taken a similar approach.

Both are clearly LLM-assisted projects, but https://noctty.com/ has a very Claude-esque front page whereas https://wintty.io/ doesn't set off my LLM detectors nearly as badly. However, Wintty's download page says "Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself" so if you decide you don't like that business model then you may wish to try Noctty, which does have prebuilt binaries.

NOTE: I have not spent any amount of time with either of those, so I can't give personal recommendations either for or against either.