I was using iTerm up until about a week ago when I unboxed a new Mac and decided to test out alternatives while setting it up. Ghostty wasn't out yet so I started with Wezterm, and was shocked to find how much it's speed improved my terminal experience. Typing latency is much better in nvim, and scrolling is vastly improved in nvim and tmux.
Ghostty feels like a Mac app like iTerm2 while being fast and having fewer features. Wezterm feels more like an app ported from Linux, but has a much richer config system and features like build-in multiplexing which means it's replaced tmux for me - while keeping all my tmux keybinds.
Is iTerm2 noticeably slow? I just use the built in Terminal app and I can’t imagine “speed” being a reason to switch away from it. (There is no lack of speed.)
The reason I switched from iTerm2 is it took multiple seconds to resize a window on macOS. I use Rectangle to resize windows, and by default my shortcut for "put this window on the left half" cycles through window sizes when the window is already on the left. So a common workflow is to tap Hyper-J to move a window to the left half, then make it the left third, then the left two thirds of the screen. This is fine for any text editor or browser, but iTerm2 would beachball while I waited multiple seconds for it to resize the window.
No, iTerm is not slow. Ghostty is not noticeably faster in any of my workflows. I am sure Ghostty is faster in some use case, but it's nothing I regularly do or have noticed.
Same, I use it all the time and never perceived it as slow. I am not a tmux user, maybe the speed is noticeable when using more complex terminal apps like that?
Do you have a lot of triggers set up in iTerm 2? IMO that’s what kills performance.
I can understand being frustrated about latency on older Macs — I used to run Alacritty for certain tasks on my Intel Macs for that reason. But on newer Macs like a new M4 Pro I’m back to 100% iTerm 2 again. I can’t fathom having latency problems with iTerm 2 on a new Mac you just unboxed.
> It's one of those things that you don't realize how poor the performance is until you experience something better.
No, it’s one of those things I’ve tested myself extensively and arrived at my own conclusion. Which I already mentioned in the comment you responded to.
The performance talk is about ghostty, which you did not mention trying. You mention alacritty, which is GPU based and offers good performance, but you're quick to rebuttal on unrelated projects.
Ghostty feels like a Mac app like iTerm2 while being fast and having fewer features. Wezterm feels more like an app ported from Linux, but has a much richer config system and features like build-in multiplexing which means it's replaced tmux for me - while keeping all my tmux keybinds.