Wezterm - an alternative to Alacritty

as a Linux user one of the things I enjoy the most is having a variety of options in terms of software so in today's video I want to discuss a permanent terminal emulator that I've recently checked out called West term now west term like I said it is a term terminal emulator um it's written in Rust and it's actually configured in Lua now me personally I don't know any Lua so um going through some of the config it was a little challenging um I did manage to write a couple of a small configuration file that kind of works for me but with all that being said let's go ahead and let's flip to the desktop here I'll show you guys West term I'll show you guys some of the features of West term and then I'll show you guys my configuration of West term which is a little bit different from the default configuration all right so we were in a BM right now and the only reason I'm showing you guys this in a VM at first is because I want to show you guys the default configuration and then I'll turn off the uh the virtual machine here and then um I'll show you guys my actual big um go ahead full screen it so let's pull up West term and this is Western just a terminal emulator um if you guys have used alacrity or anything like that it's pretty much the same thing it can run the same commands um but it is a little bit different and that's kind of what I like um and as you can also see up here it has a um like a toolbar and then we can you can you can hit the plus sign to add tabs so it does have to have support it has all kinds of like little niche things let's go ahead and pull up the um the website here um this is the GitHub the GitHub pretty much just points you to the uh to the website so this is the West term um website and I got really nice um kind of background here showing off the the emulator and showing off some of the colors and stuff and then we have a list of like features on the right left hand side here and then we'll cover some of these features um but pretty much uh it runs on Linux Mac OS and windows um so it is cross platform um it does do Multiplex terminals so I think tmux is another Multiplex type of terminal um it supports ligatures color emojis fonts uh fail fallback and uh Dynamic color schemes so Dynamic color schemes what that is is pretty much whenever you change the color scheme in your configuration as soon as you write that configuration file out it will dynamically change your color scheme um and we'll check out when we check out my configuration of it um we'll we'll test that out but um I thought that was a really cool feature um so yeah um it can do I can kind of do a lot um it has searchable scroll back um and like I said you can have multiple windows you can split the panes I mean this thing and then of course Tab support but you can do um you can do a lot with this um it's got SSH support with Native tabs um you can connect to it for like an embedded Arduino type of stuff um it has Kitty graphic support it has image protocol support um so I'll show you guys that in a second here but let's pull up this West term and let's check it out a little bit so I do want to go over some of these Futures with you guys and uh so we can do if we wanted to split the pain here we can do control shift all and then the um the percent sign and you can see it splits and splits that pain right um and now if we hit Ctrl shift and then Arrow key you can switch you can switch those so I can do PWD here and you can go between those as you like um now I personally I personally wouldn't really use that um but that's just me um I don't use the terminal emulator like that um it also you can have multiple windows so if we do the hotkey super in you can see we pull up a new window here another new window another new window and we can just keep on going right now what I will say the only thing bad about this terminal emulator that I've seen so far is some of the default keybinds um they could interfere with um like if you run a it's just a window manager most of us that run in Window Manager we use the super key as a uh as like our modifier key right and a lot of the keybinds for this emulator uses the Super Key um so if you're going to use some of these shortcuts um you may need to rewrite the rewrite a configuration file in order to use different shortcut keys just so you don't interfere with your window manager keys um exit out of that one and then we also got Tab support like I said so it's a Super T - there you go another Super button or keybind and you can see we got these abs at the top right um so that's pretty cool um I do like that um even though I don't use tabs um I've never been a tab type of guy um I don't like I just don't like using them I use a window manager and for myself I can just you know pull up three different uh emulators if I need to um I don't need app support um but if you are a tab person I know a lot of you guys are um you can actually pull up tabs you can have three or four different tabs however many you want and then we can it says we can see some of the keybinds are kind of weird um like these key bounds right here like these are weird to me it's super shift and then the the brackets um I I personally would use something else and then we also had this super one through nine so I'm guessing this is going to be three and then two and then one here um so we can do super two super three but again if you're a window manager user you would have done flipped workspaces because most of us use the Super Key as the modifier key so um I get what they're doing and I really like it um I like that the emulator I just don't like the keybinds another thing I don't like about this is they do not have a default configuration file um they don't have one they show you how to write one they pretty much show you what you have to do um but they don't have an actual default configuration file um there are some other things I want to show you before we flip over to mine um let's look at the image support now this is a feature that I haven't really played around with on my system but as I was you know preparing this video for you guys uh I was looking over the Futures and everything and I actually fight around with this here on the VM and this is awesome this is this is pretty cool so we can display images in our terminal now I don't know if alacrity can do that I don't think alacrity can do that um I could be wrong but this is really really neat stuff so we can go to user share and I think it's backgrounds xfce um so we have these jpegs and engs so if we do West term uh image cat and then we do xfce uh we can do blue boom that's a full image inside of your terminal that that's pretty cool now I don't know why you would use something like that um but it's there um let's see if it use uh can do uh SBG support too nope okay that's fine it can't do SVG but it can do PNG no it can do jpeg let's see if it can do PNG um Let's do let's try stripes it wanted to render something didn't it let's try another one vertical maybe there we go okay so it can't do PNG it can do um probably all your standard uh image formats PNG jpeg stuff like that but it looked like it couldn't do the SVG which is fun yeah honestly I probably wouldn't even use this feature but the fact that this feature is built in this is pretty neat um another cool thing about this is that it can do scroll back um so this is on the weird um let me find uh the thing here uh okay so let's pop in Neo okay so near we can do neofetch right now let's say that we wanted to search for something on the screen well we could do that if we do Ctrl shift F right and now you see we're in this mode this copy mode and if we do search we can do void Linux and you can see it highlight it right there right like just quickly highlight it and I think there is a quick key well yeah we could we could control shift C and it will copy that selected text to the clipboard so control shift C now let's see let's see if it actually um if it actually copied it um Ctrl shift B Maybe there it is can show shift B so it actually did copy all of that that stuff to the clipboard um and that's pretty cool um and you can search for anything anything on the screen I'm gonna do kernel um now it is case sensitive so um we would have to search for it right away I wonder if it could actually search configuration files because that would be really cool um let's look at another feature here um so it has it says it has implicit and explicit hyperlinks I don't know there's a default rule to match urls Okay so it looks like it just displays links I'm guessing well let's put a link in to see if it displays it um what do you google.com I mean not okay how about this https all right so you can see my little cursor switch over there right can I not okay I can click on it it just takes a minute to click on it and for Firefox to to realize it's a link that's that's fine um yeah I mean uh this thing is pretty pretty cool now let's look at a little bit of the configuration here if I can get the uh my connection to work I just updated um void Linux here for some reason the name server got all screwed up so I do apologize about the low connection here I might have to do this on my actual system um that's kind of why I had some of this stuff automatically already pulled up um but you can also see right here though it says the configuration like it does do hot plugging or hot reloading rather so everything you write in your config it as soon as you save it West term just it's super fast um so look at the config so this is kind of the configuration um it's a little different if you don't know like I said I'm I'm not a Lua programmer by any means um and they kind of go down as hierarchy of how Western figures out what configuration or default config to use um what I would say is just go ahead and make uh put a West term in your um dot config uh hinge directory um that's what I did and it it works um so you can see right here home.config West term West terms um that's pretty much how I did it and then I think they even say how to do it or Wayland and stuff so um and then for Windows stuff blah blah um there I will say too that they're um their documentation is pretty good I guess it's legit good um like you can click on any part of this and it will it will take you there like I said the internet I mean my connection here kind of sucks so let me go ahead and flip over to my actual configuration and uh maybe I'll go ahead and pull up I'll pull up West terms website here for you guys um so we can actually look at the config um so yeah you can see I mean it goes It goes into detail about configs and they got they just got a lot of they got a lot of color schemes um because you had to launch specific stuff I mean there's there's a lot to this um curious like config um they also have a Vulcan Pig and like a Lua reference so if you're if you're a little skills kind of suck like mine then uh yeah you can learn a little bit um so let me show you my West term config or my West term and then I'll show you my Western actual config um that's my West term now you may be thinking man this looks exactly like alacrity and guess what you would be right in fact on the right hand side here this is alacrity this is West Herr they look dead up the same the only thing I would say is specifically on the monitor that I'm looking at right now that has these two terminals is that this monitor doesn't show blacks uh real nice and West Herm actually looks a lot nicer on this specific monitor than alacrity does alacrity is just it's a lot lighter in color um which is not it's not a bad thing I'm just saying that it's um that's just how it's displayed um now you can also notice we do not have a title bar at the top right like I said I don't use title bars I don't really don't use tabs and all that nonsense right so if we do a tab though Watch What Happens now we have a title bar that's pretty cool right so I have it set where if it's only showing one which is the main window don't show the title bar now let's go ahead and go over my actual config and I'll show you guys kind of what I've done um so we'll do config and then we'll do uh West term here and then I have a readme document which is yes I made this a DOT org um and then I did my West term Lua um impact let's go ahead um I'll just pull this up in Neil boom it doesn't matter um all right there we go so I did the very much but the documentation said to do right I did this require West term and then I got this return um function called config I'm guessing this is a function not sure actually Lula has really kind of stumped me a little bit I'm not sure if that's a class or what it is it looks like a class like in another programming language that would be a class um that's fun guessing it might be but not 100 sure but as you can see I pretty much got my color scheme I like Dracula you guys know that um I got my font size 16. um and then right here I have jetbrands mono nerd font and then I have my weight and then it's how like I have that set to false because we don't need a talc font but I do like my color I would I do like my font bold or semi-bold I just think it looks a lot better in the terminal here um and then this default prog this is my shell um I suppose to the face shell I've been playing around with it a little bit too um just to have a variety um and then right here is really where um I hid the uh the tab bar and uh I had the mouse cursor when I type so I don't know if you guys noticed that but if I go over here and here's my mouse cursor right here I'll keep it right here now watch what happens when I start typing goes away I can move it goes away I think that's a pretty cool pretty cool feature um and then her cursor style I just have it like a steady underline so you can see the underline like right there now before I go I do want to show you guys this hot reloading of this uh of these color schemes you can do this with anything you can do this with font size anything and it's like that I mean it's it's super fast um it's pretty it's pretty nice so if we want to change the font size to like 12. right boom done you see that the fonts just they changed right and actually 12 doesn't look too bad um Publix actually pretty good um I might change it to 14 here just a little bit bigger but yeah 14's not 14 is not bad what about color schemes right um we do Dracula let's do I don't know let's try that Batman out boom done you can see the right hand side I mean it's about Nord we got some Nord there's Nord um I don't know what else uh I like my Dracula what about Doom we got Doom no Doom no Doom one everyone has team one no okay let's go to the website here uh do you want to check out the website um big color schemes let's look at d they got darkilah not Dracula darkula uh dark plus dark Matrix unless y'all got Doom do not have them got Doom Pig do more right there I knew we had some Doom one I don't personally want this color scheme but I know quite a few people do oh no uh undo game one maybe there he is team one that looks I don't know man that looks kind of ugly doesn't it I don't like I don't like that um what about darkula or you uh what's the difference between dark yellow and Dracula that doesn't look like no darkula but yeah uh I mean I know I'm getting kind of carried away here um but it is so there's whoa there's the base 16 version and then there's the regular version what's the base 16 version I do want to check this out before I let you guys go um let's yeah base 16. okay let's look at the non base 16. like what's the difference okay that makes sense so the base 16 right a16 see how light it is now if we go up here to compare our and he apologize about that um if we okay if we go up here to compare see that almost looks like the same now right so that means what that means to me is that on alacrity they're using the base 16 colors color scheme maybe um or dust the color scheme that um I don't know who I got this config my my lacrity config probably uh DT so maybe DT was using the base 16 version of uh the the Dracula color scheme um this almost looks dead up the same um other than the Starship type of stuff right um but I actually prefer the the darker the darker one so but yeah I mean that's that's pretty much it uh I wanted to show you guys about West term um not I mean it's not you know it's not anything really special just a different terminal emulator and uh yeah I really like it the only thing I would say is um like I said Lua is kind of weird to kind of play around with um it is teaching me some things so I do enjoy that aspect of it but um there's not a default configuration file and I don't I don't know why um so if you guys don't mind writing your own config and or if you guys don't mind um just kind of starting from scratch then uh yeah give us a shot check it out and uh yeah that's all I got all right hit the like And subscribe button if you guys don't mind make sure you guys leave me a comment down below um tell me if you guys have checked out this terminal emulator before and if you have uh tell me what you guys think of it all right but until next time I want you guys to take care be safe and peace bye guys

Channel: LinuxTechGeek

Views: 9,356

Keywords: wezterm linux, wezterm alacritty, wezterm gentoo linux, wezterm LinuxTechGeek, Wezterm LinuxTechGeek, Wezterm, Wezterm terminal eumlator, wezterm term emulator, terminal emulator, wezterm term emul, wezterm void linux

Id: e0YC1JHG4-0

Length: 29min 9sec (1749 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023