State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

[vassudanagunta]

The Gentleman Errant

Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct.

In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.

from State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

Might want to mention/quote this on homepage or README

See also Hacker News discussion.

[hqnna]

Yeah, Jeff brought up the results in our Discord.