Choosing a terminal for MacOS
- Currently using: iTerm2.
- Reason for the change: iTerm2 consumes too much CPU, and messes up full screen window sizes on restore from sleep.
- Considering: WezTerm.
- Blocker: no minimal contrast setting.
- Decision: back to iTerm2 for now.
Decided to look into WezTerm. Started configuring it, and discovered that it has >1000 themes to choose from, but does not have a “minimal contrast” setting like iTerm2. I think that’s a blocker for me, because most of the light themes have very poor contrast out of the box.
Update 2024-12-30
Tried to configure Ghostty, was excited that it does have the minimal-contrast setting, but unfortunately it is not currently working well (especially as compared to iTerm2).
- When threshold is met, it doesn’t increase the contrast to meet the requirement, but rather makes text white/black.
- It doesn’t seem to work for light backgrounds (still operates like background is dark).
Here’s an issue about this. For now this is a deal breaker.
Resources:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41223934
- https://alexplescan.com/posts/2024/08/10/wezterm/
- https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/wezterm/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/v86m6o/why_doesnt_wezterm_get_any_attention_compared_to/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/wezterm/comments/1df0e4d/contrast_settings/