Make a Powerful Terminal Workspace

Table of Contents

My terminal setup has gone through two changes. I first moved from iTerm2 + Zsh + Tmux to Alacritty + Fish + Zellij, and later swapped Alacritty for Wezterm. Today my stack is Wezterm + Fish + Zellij. The combination is fast and versatile, and the ability to customize each tool in depth is the main reason I have kept it. All of these tools are open source; the links below point to their download pages.

Configuring these tools can be time-consuming and occasionally frustrating.

Wezterm
#

Wezterm is a fast, highly customizable, cross-platform terminal emulator. It is written in Rust and uses OpenGL and DirectWrite for GPU-accelerated rendering. The features that matter most to me:

Cross-platform support. Wezterm runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, so the same configuration follows me across machines.
GPU-accelerated rendering. Scrolling and typing stay smooth even under heavy output.
Extensive configuration. Colors, fonts, transparency, and key bindings are all adjustable.
Built-in multiplexing. Wezterm can run and manage multiple terminal sessions in a single window, much like tmux.
Shell integration. Features such as automatic directory tracking and local echo come with it.

On macOS, Homebrew installs it in one command:

brew install wezterm

For Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD, download the installer or package from the Wezterm GitHub releases page. Once installed, launch it by typing wezterm in an existing terminal or from your application menu.

The configuration file is written in Lua and lives in your home directory. For example, to change the default font size:

wezterm = {
  font_size = 11.0,
}

If you want better performance, more customization, or simply a more pleasant terminal, Wezterm is worth trying.

Alacritty
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After installing Alacritty, create a configuration file at ~/.alacritty.yml. I keep all of my configurations, including Alacritty’s, on GitHub, and the file is commented to explain the available options.

One thing to watch for on macOS: the alt key needs to be mapped to option (meta). The background is in this issue. Since Alacritty 0.12.0 there is no need to remap keys one by one; a single option does it:

window:
  option_as_alt: Both

You can also change the color theme. I like the base 16 themes.

Zellij
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I used Tmux for a long time, but since learning Rust I have been drawn to tools written in it. Zellij is one of them. It is friendlier than Tmux: key bindings are built in and hints are displayed directly in the terminal, so there is no need to keep a cheat sheet open. The configuration file lives at ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl, and honestly you may not need to add anything to it. As with Alacritty, the color theme is easy to change.

Fish
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Fish has saved me a lot of time. Unlike Zsh, it does not need a pile of plugins to be useful: autosuggestions, history search, and rich completions work out of the box. Plugins are available if you want them; Fisher is the plugin manager for Fish, and its README lists recommended plugins. Fish is also easy to customize, from the prompt to the greeting message. I use the Tide prompt, which is clean and visually appealing.