A couple of annoyances I've had shipping CLI apps to Konsole users:

1. By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support. Users can enable it manually, but you need to ship fallbacks by default since otherwise the default users will have a broken experience. Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, etc all ship working OSC8 support out of the box.

2. No built-in Nerd Font support, so if you want to render icons, you need to tell your users to set up a patched font or else have fallbacks. Ghostty and WezTerm ship built-in Nerd Font fallbacks if your configured font isn't patched.

That being said Konsole is much better than most emulators. iTerm2 is not bad, although it lacks Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support (which all of the above have, including Konsole, and which is very useful for drawing prettier terminal UIs). The worst by far is Apple Terminal, truly the IE6 of terminal emulators.

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What's so bad about Apple Terminal? I've tried iTerm2 and others but never found a compelling reason to use them over the stock app. I don't live in the terminal like some do, though.

	▲	reissbaker 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Apple Terminal doesn't support: 1. The Kitty keyboard protocol, which makes it impossible to distinguish e.g. Shift-Enter from Enter 2. OSC8 hyperlinks 3. It breaks on APC queries, so you need special handling to not emit them 4. Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support 5. The Kitty Terminal Graphics Protocol (or sixel) 6. OSC 9 notifications (or any of the later versions) and a bunch of other stuff, this is just off the top of my head. For a long time they didn't even support 24-bit color, although they fixed that in Tahoe. It's totally fine for basic UNIX tooling, but pretty painful if you're trying to make nice interactive TUIs.

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hnlmorg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support.

That is, in my opinion, the correct default.

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adrian_b 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I believe that the default behavior should be to never open a link without a confirmation from the user that this may be done.

This should be enough to avoid malicious links. I do not believe that completely disabling links is a good default, because they are very frequently useful when you read some text file in the terminal window.

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reissbaker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, I agree. Ghostty et al don't open-on-click, but on hover they'll show you the URL and there's a keyboard shortcut + click to open. This is much better UX than disabling OSC8.

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tjoff 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, because more complexity where you don't expect it doesn't cost anything?

Up until 5 hours ago this fix was not present:

> The displayed target is sanitized so invisible and line-breaking characters cannot conceal the effective destination.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/G...

The sensible default is to have it turned off. And by the looks of it Ghostty versions before this you couldn't even turn it off.

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reissbaker an hour ago | parent [-]

"One implementation of a feature had a bug, therefore this feature should be turned off on all implementations by default" is probably not going to convince people who think the feature is good.

If you don't want to be able to have clickable hyperlinks, by all means use Konsole — no one is forcing you to use Ghostty. But if you want to know why people like Ghostty's approach vs Konsole's, it's because Ghostty pushes terminal emulator features forward and is low latency. Konsole is low latency and adopts some but not all features that other people invent. It's a noticeable difference and so people who like the feature part of the former like Ghostty/WezTerm/Kitty more than Konsole. If you don't care or dislike that part, and want a more conservative terminal (that is also low latency), Konsole and many others further on the conservative spectrum exist.

	▲	hnlmorg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not just one implementation. Browsers have been struggling to get this right for decades and now we are destined to repeat all the same problems all over again with an entirely new syntax of inlined markup.

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hnlmorg an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t want random text in my terminal to be a link. I do not find that useful.

If people want it enabled, they can enable it. It shouldn’t be the default.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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