Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by christophilus on Monday November 03, 2025 @03:40PM
(#45804155)
Foot is excellent. Wayland only, but it is very fast to launch, and uses few resources. I love it.
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| on HN ]
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by ac29 on Monday November 03, 2025 @04:26PM
(#45804646)
Yep this is my current favorite too. I liked ghostty when I evaluated it, but for some reason it uses an order of magnitude more memory than foot to display a single, empty terminal.
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by tristan957 on Monday November 03, 2025 @07:50PM
(#45806357)
Ghostty uses GTK + GPU rendering while Foot uses Wayland primitives and CPU rendering.
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by colordrops on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @03:04AM
(#45808540)
I've seen zero performance issues with foot.
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by tristan957 on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @09:54AM
(#45887906)
My comment was not to imply that Ghostty performed better than Foot. Foot is a great terminal.
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by colordrops on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @03:03AM
(#45808536)
Foot is the best. Love ctrl-shift-o to open up links
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by RVuRnvbM2e on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @04:12AM
(#45808921)
I'm quite confused why this article tests foot v1.16.2, which is two years old at this point. The latest version is 1.25.0.
By contrast, the tested version of ghostty v1.2.3 is two weeks old.
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by aorth on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @07:52AM
(#45810432)
Good point. I just submitted a pull request with new data for foot 1.25.0 https://github.com/jquast/ucs-detect/pull/17. The test suite is really easy to run (and fast, foot rocks!).
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by moderation on Wednesday November 05, 2025 @05:47AM
(#45821518)
Similarly kitty is at 0.44.0 [0], zutty at 0.16.0 [1]
Re:State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions
by bdunks on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @08:04AM
(#45810554)
I agree. I started using Foot based on a recommendation from the notcurses library author, who has deep expertise in terminal emulation and collaborates with maintainers.
A tip for new users: The default theme is a bit harsh. I was able to port my Alacritty theme and other config by feeding the config file to an LLM (along with the Foot documentation). It generated a configuration that was 80-90% correct and only required about five minutes of manual fixes.
The result is now visually identical to my Alacritty setup, but Foot feels faster.