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Terminal Tools and Gear Roundups

Roundups of the things you install, buy, and then stare at for the next several years. The trade-offs are left in: a roundup where every option is excellent is a roundup that has told you nothing.

What you look at all day

Section titled “What you look at all day”
  • Best terminal emulators 2026 — Warp, Ghostty, kitty, iTerm2, Windows Terminal, Alacritty and WezTerm, with the honest case against each one. The window matters more than the editor inside it.
  • Best terminal fonts — JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Cascadia Code and the rest, rendered in themselves rather than described at you, plus what the Nerd Font business is actually about and which variant to install.
  • Terminal feature support matrix — truecolor, undercurl, sixel, kitty graphics, OSC 8, OSC 52 and the kitty keyboard protocol across seven macOS terminals, on factory settings. What the feature lists claim, against what turns up on screen.
  • Linux terminal feature support matrix — the same tests across ten Linux terminals: GNOME Terminal, Ptyxis, Konsole, foot, xterm and the five cross-platform ones. Konsole draws more than its reputation suggests; xterm, rather less.
  • Terminal test — the matrix’s rows as one curl | sh, drawn in your own terminal with your own font and config, and what to do about each row that fails.

Narrowed it down to two

Section titled “Narrowed it down to two”

The roundup gets you a shortlist; these settle it. Same products, argued at length rather than summarised.

  • Ghostty vs iTerm2 — the new native Mac terminal against the fifteen-year incumbent. Speed, config files, feature depth, and the one iTerm2 feature that ends the argument on its own.
  • Alacritty vs kitty — both fast, both a text file, and completely opposed on how much a terminal should do. Tabs, ligatures, kittens, and the TERM problem they share.
  • tmux vs Zellij — the multiplexer everyone uses against the one designed this decade. Modes, sessions that survive a reboot, and the reason tmux still wins on a server.

What you type on

Section titled “What you type on”
  • Best mechanical keyboards for coding — Keychron, HHKB, NuPhy and ZSA, from a sensible first board to the ergonomic deep end. A hobby disguised as a purchase, handled carefully.

What you run in it

Section titled “What you run in it”
  • The modern CLI starter pack — eza, bat, ripgrep, fd, zoxide, fzf and delta. The Unix classics have been on the job since the seventies; these seven noticed, and only some of them are worth aliasing over the originals.
  • Fun terminal commands — cowsay, fortune, figlet, lolcat, sl, cmatrix and the rest of the toys, and the pipes that snap them together. Useless, and a better lesson in pipes than most of the useful tools.
  • Linux playground — all of the above, plus tmux, Zellij and Starship, installed in a real Linux VM that runs in your browser tab. Try before you brew install.

Kit sorted? The guides cover what to do with it — prompts, tmux, SSH, dotfiles and the tools deep enough to deserve a page each.