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WezTerm

Hacker Approved

Ranked 6 of 40 terminal emulators by recommenders

People recommend WezTerm as a fast, consistent cross-platform terminal that is configured and scripted in Lua. The most common caveat is font rendering problems.

People recommend WezTerm as a fast, consistent cross-platform terminal that is configured and scripted in Lua. The most common caveat is font rendering problems.

73 people gave an opinion

recommend it
59
criticize it
14
approval share
81%
Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes

Recommended in 11 of 13 months

  1. November 2025: recommended
  2. December 2025: recommended
  3. January 2026: recommended
  4. February 2026: recommended
  5. March 2026: recommended
  6. April 2026: recommended
  7. May 2026: not recommended
  8. June 2026: recommended
  9. July 2026: recommended
  10. August 2026: recommended
  11. September 2026: recommended
  12. October 2026: recommended
  13. November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)

Owned for 2 years

Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.

Each square is one year.

Why it carries the badge

  • 59 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
  • 4.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
  • Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.

The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works

What people say about it

The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.

Why people recommend it

Each mark is one comment

  • Same setup on every platform

    “It is the only cross platform terminal emulator that truly provides an identical experience for me between Mac and Linux.”

    Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

    “I can fire up a Linux terminal with WezTerm and WSL2 at any point. It's customized and beautiful and totally fine.”

    Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”

    “I like being able to share one configuration my company Windows and my personal Linux laptops”

    Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”
  • Lua config you can script

    “the biggest win was taking Wezterm and having claude build Lua scripts for the features I'm missing”

    Comment from 4 Aug 2026 in “Devtools must be open source”

    “Wezterm works perfectly, and I appreciate the .lua configuration over iTerm2's mess of menus.”

    Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

    “being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits”

    Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”
  • Fast and reliable in daily use

    “Without fanfare, without constantly blogging non stop about itself, and especially, without memory leaks.”

    Comment from 10 Jan 2026 in “Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory Leak”

    “I use WezTerm most often because it is fastest to give me a window when I hit the assigned shortcut key.”

    Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”

    “they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday”

    Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”
  • Built-in tabs, panes and sessions

    “I currently use WezTerm for exactly the feature tty7 advertises about session support.”

    Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

    “it's so nice having first-class UI windows rather than tmux's faking of it”

    Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

    “scriptable enough (lua) that you can session management”

    Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Make Tmux Pretty and Usable”

What people warn about

Each mark is one comment

  • Font rendering problems

    “I had some issues with Wezterm fonts - I was able to configure it away”

    Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”

    “wezterm, which is pretty great, but renders fonts too thin by default”

    Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”

    “I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did”

    Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”
  • Slow or constant redrawing

    “Wezterm is great but I found it noticeably slow in some (dumb) instances”

    Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Ghostty is now non-profit”

    “I can't copy/paste in wezterm using the keyboard/vim keys because it is constantly drawing the screen”

    Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “Herdr: One terminal to rule them all”
  • Weak accessibility support

    “Today, I use Wezterm, which VoiceOver doesn't read at all.”

    Comment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Another Day Has Come”

    “most GPU-rendered terminal emulators don't engage in system-provided accessibility APIs AT ALL”

    Comment from 4 May 2026 in “The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility”

Other terminal emulators people recommend

The four most recommended other terminal emulators, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.

WezTerm compared with 4 alternatives
ProductRecommendCriticizeApprovalMonthsOwnedBadge
Ghostty40115872%123 mo22 ownersApproved
Termux1883186%121 yr6 ownersApproved
iTerm2956958%1210 yrs4 owners—
Warp terminal848649%111 yr5 owners—
WezTermThis page591481%112 yrs3 ownersApproved
See all 40 terminal emulators, ranked

What people said

40 of the 88 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.

“It is the only cross platform terminal emulator that truly provides an identical experience for me between Mac and Linux.”

RecommendsComment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“Wezterm has a similar feature with QuickSelect, absolutely game-changing for keyboard-driven workflows”

RecommendsComment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“Run wezterm on both with shared config. It’s amazing.”

RecommendsComment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“I currently use WezTerm for exactly the feature tty7 advertises about session support.”

RecommendsComment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits”

RecommendsComment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“Ghostty and WezTerm ship built-in Nerd Font fallbacks if your configured font isn't patched.”

RecommendsComment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“I like being able to share one configuration my company Windows and my personal Linux laptops”

RecommendsComment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Ghostty 1.4”

“it is very convenient to be able to view images in the command line”

RecommendsComment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Are we SIXEL yet?”

“I can fire up a Linux terminal with WezTerm and WSL2 at any point. It's customized and beautiful and totally fine.”

RecommendsComment from 30 Aug 2026 in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”

“being able to use ctrl-shift-p to control the entire terminal is nice”

MixedComment from 4 Aug 2026 in “The Warp Agent CLI”

“the biggest win was taking Wezterm and having claude build Lua scripts for the features I'm missing”

RecommendsComment from 4 Aug 2026 in “Devtools must be open source”

“wezterm 20260713-212414-b3255666 runs at 415fps”

MixedComment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours”

“I use Wezterm which uses Lua as a config language”

RecommendsComment from 20 Jul 2026 in “Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files”

“WezTerm have been fine and I've had much more reasonable battery life since”

RecommendsComment from 19 Jul 2026 in “Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now”

“Since I discovered that I never want to use another term.”

RecommendsComment from 12 Jul 2026 in “Ghostel.el: Terminal emulator powered by libghostty”

“I can't copy/paste in wezterm using the keyboard/vim keys because it is constantly drawing the screen”

CriticizesComment from 7 Jul 2026 in “Herdr: One terminal to rule them all”

“most GPU-rendered terminal emulators don't engage in system-provided accessibility APIs AT ALL”

CriticizesComment from 4 May 2026 in “The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility”

“Today, I use Wezterm, which VoiceOver doesn't read at all.”

RecommendsComment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Another Day Has Come”

“scriptable enough (lua) that you can session management”

RecommendsComment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Make Tmux Pretty and Usable”

“I run several sessions in multiple tabs in WezTerm”

RecommendsComment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI”

“wezterm I need to reconnect all the time, but that works reliably”

MixedComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“I regularly select hundreds of lines in Wezterm. I have never had a problem.”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“it's a terminal you program rather than configure”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“it's so nice having first-class UI windows rather than tmux's faking of it”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did”

CriticizesComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“Wezterm works perfectly, and I appreciate the .lua configuration over iTerm2's mess of menus.”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“Wezterms is certainly nice. I guess they haven't release another update?”

MixedComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator”

“they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday”

RecommendsComment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

“There are a handful of good terminal emulators. Weztern, alacritty, and kitty are popular.”

MixedComment from 11 Jan 2026 in “Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory Leak”

“Without fanfare, without constantly blogging non stop about itself, and especially, without memory leaks.”

RecommendsComment from 10 Jan 2026 in “Finding and Fixing Ghostty's Largest Memory Leak”

“I used a much simplified version of it with WezTerm and remote Emacs.”

MixedComment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Term-keys – Lossless keyboard input for Emacs”

“Wezterm is an excellent project but it doesn't have native UI chrome like Ghostty does.”

RecommendsComment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Ghostty is now non-profit”

“Wezterm is great but I found it noticeably slow in some (dumb) instances”

MixedComment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Ghostty is now non-profit”

“WezTerm has a Lua API and is as complicated as you want it to be”

RecommendsComment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Ghostty is now non-profit”

“Wezterm standardizes the terminal across all platforms”

RecommendsComment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable”

“Lovely setup, super fast, all in the terminal.”

RecommendsComment from 10 Nov 2025 in “The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need”

“I use WezTerm most often because it is fastest to give me a window when I hit the assigned shortcut key.”

RecommendsComment from 4 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”

“I had some issues with Wezterm fonts - I was able to configure it away”

MixedComment from 4 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”

“wezterm, which is pretty great, but renders fonts too thin by default”

MixedComment from 3 Nov 2025 in “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.