3 ms·
I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (
by jay-barronville 3y ago
I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (there’s a lot going on in those screenshots), and (3) it’s likely slow (I might be completely wrong).
To elaborate a bit…
1. I love good design work and well-designed (UI-wise) software, and it certainly looks like the creators of Wave Terminal have made that a priority.
2. UX-wise, there’s just too much going on. As someone who lives in my terminal (with the exception of browsing the web, I do virtually everything in my terminal), it’s the single most critical piece of software on my computer and it can never get in my way. I used the same terminal for many years and only switched to kitty [0] a couple years ago after testing it for months. In all of those years, every single terminal I tested managed to get in my way. Somehow, kitty manages to be packed full of features without ever—not even once—getting in my way, being slow, or freezing up on me.
3. Generally speaking, I think building on open web standards is a great thing and a plus. Unfortunately though, even in 2023, my experience has been that it’s really hard to build performant software meant to be run on native platforms using web technologies; the few who get this right—e.g., Figma—are anomalies and they generally invest an enormous amount of time and engineering capital into squeezing out as much performance as possible. As I explained in #2, for something as critical as my terminal, not being performant is simply not an option, so as much as I love the idea of building on open web standards, it actually scares me for software like this.
That said, I’m obviously judging before trying here, so I’ll make some time to test Wave Terminal.
[0]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
- behnamoh 3y agoTried Kitty for a few months. Didn't like the developer's attitude when people raised concerns and asked for "tabs". He said "just go use tmux on top of Kitty." I use tmux sometimes, but the idea that you have to glue together several pieces of software (each of which can break at any point) just to get basic functionality (like tabs that some people want) is insane. I stopped using Kitty and switched over to iTerm2 and have been happy ever since. Most importantly, it allows me to set a custom keyboard shortcut to summon my terminal any time on macOS.
- aumerle 3y agoUmm kitty has native tabs and the developer never tells anyone to tuse tmux, on the contrary he tells people not to use tmux. You are confusing kitty with alacritty.
- esafak 3y ago2. I agree that the UI needs a lot of polish. I would get a designer if you don't have one, and have another designer critique it if you do.