terminal preferences as of late

07 Feb 2025

for the last decade or so, i’ve stopped using customized terminals and vim becauase it just became too much work to keep up with. i joked that it was a “young man’s sport” as it was something i was really into in my teens and 20s.

now that i’m a little older, and had to bounce around between servers, computers, etc. for work, i found that i just liked using the defaults. it forced me to learn them and then i was getting more proficient in any random environment that had plain tmux, vim, and bash.

but lately, there’s been a few projects that are really nice and basically zero-config which i love.

first are two terminals i really like, ghostty and warp. ghostty is definitely my daily driver now, but warp has a lot of nice features. ghostty is open source and because of that alone, that’s why i use it all the time. it has a zero-config philosophy and everything works beautifully out of the box. so, when i use things like lazyvim, all the icons and everything works, and i love that.

warp is just super nice, but i am so weirded out by it being a closed source company creating a terminal. that seems… just weird. so they have thigns like paid plans and AI (because you can’t get funding as a company if you don’t shove AI in your product, i guess). but the way they format output and also handle the prompt themselves is really cool.

i mentioned lazyvim, but it’s really great and easy to install. i am using it for my IDE now.

p.s. even though ghostty is zero-config, there is a little bit of config i’ve added to modify the theme and this is what i use on macos:

> cat ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config
macos-titlebar-style = tabs
theme = light:nord-light,dark:nord``

and then i am also using a couple options in my lazyvim configs. the first is toggleterm which is nifty. i have this in ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/toggleterm.lua:

return {
  {
    "akinsho/toggleterm.nvim",
    config = true,
    cmd = "ToggleTerm",
    build = ":ToggleTerm",
    keys = { { "<C-`>", "<cmd>ToggleTerm<cr>", desc = "Toggle Terminal" } },
    opts = {
      open_mapping = [[<C-`>]],
      direction = "float",
      shade_filetypes = {},
      hide_numbers = true,
      insert_mappings = true,
      terminal_mappings = true,
      start_in_insert = true,
      close_on_exit = true,
    },
  },
}

and then i have the equivalent of set tw=72 in ~/.config/nvim/lua/config/options.lua

vim.opt.tw = 72

and then i just install a handful of things from :LazyExtras. everything else is mostly stock then… 🤡