xfce4-terminal vs. foot
April 5, 2022
April 5, 2022
This is going to be a pretty personal piece, but I figured I’d share either way. 🤷
I’ve been using xfce4-terminal as my terminal emulator on Linux for quite a while now, and I like it. It’s lightweight, supports emojis and has transparency, and it just works for me.
Recently I switched to Wayland, and saw that Sway (the Wayland alternative to i3) was using foot as their default terminal emulator. I didn’t know about it, but it’s described as “a fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator”, which sounds like music to my ears, so I decided to try it!
Here’s my feedback after using it for a couple of weeks, in particular the issues I encountered and the fixes I found.
The (deep) details are explained in this issue on Vim, this issue on foot, and the solution is documented in foot’s wiki.
Basically, doing some Ctrl key combinations can break other Ctrl key mappings when using Vim inside foot.
This is due to the fact that foot uses CSI 27 escape sequences for some key combinations but keeps using “legacy” escape sequences for others.
xterm defines a feature modifyOtherKeys
defining 2 behaviors for dealing with escape sequences (level 1 and
level 2).
foot implements the level 1 but after seeing a CSI 27 escape sequence, Vim assumes level 2, resulting in this incompatibility.
As mentioned in foot’s wiki,
I added the following to my vimrc to fix it:
"
" Make Vim and foot collaborate.
"
" See <https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/wiki#ctrl-key-breaks-input-in-vim>
" and <https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/9014>.
"
let &t_TI = "\<Esc>[>4;2m"
let &t_TE = "\<Esc>[>4m"
If you’re curious about t_TI and t_TE, you can read more about it
here.
Bracketed paste allows terminal emulator to communicate through escape sequences that content is being pasted as opposed of being typed, allowing programs to handle the content differently.
This is especially useful inside Vim to paste text without having to
care about turning on and off paste mode (for example to avoid messed
up indent when pasting code).
Vim doesn’t know that foot supports bracketed paste so it doesn’t work
by default. But as shown in :help xterm-bracketed-paste, we can hint
at it by adding this to our vimrc:
if &term =~ "foot"
let &t_BE = "\e[?2004h"
let &t_BD = "\e[?2004l"
exec "set t_PS=\e[200~"
exec "set t_PE=\e[201~"
endif
Not too bad!
This is for Vim specifically, but from looking at this issue, it looks like there might be other bracketed paste support issues with other software that need to be addressed individually. Not a problem for me for now…
I took for granted to be able to Ctrl + click links in terminal emulators. foot took a different approach to this with a keyboard-driven URL mode:
Pressing Ctrl + Shift + U enters “URL mode”, where all currently visible URLs are underlined, and is associated with a “jump-label”. The jump-label indicates the key sequence (e.g. “AF”) to use to activate the URL.
I love the ability to be able to navigate URLs using my keyboard only, but I also like to have the option to click those links.
Sometimes the cost of pressing Ctrl + Shift + U, identify the “jump-label” and typing it, feels higher than the cost of switching to my trackpad and Ctrl + clicking the URL I’m already looking at.
I probably would get used to it after a while if I only used foot, but I also use iTerm2 on macOS where I Command + click the links, and I like to keep shortcuts and habits somewhat consistent between all the systems I use.
foot is indeed fast and lightweight, and it’s a great Wayland terminal emulator.
Because it sets TERM=foot in the environment, many programs (like Vim)
don’t have built-in support for it (e.g. knowing how foot handles escape
sequences and bracketed paste), meaning that you might need to add extra
configuration to all the programs where you need this to add foot
support.
xfce4-terminal, for better or for worse, sets TERM=xterm-256color,
which means most programs know out of the box how to deal with it (as
long as it maintains proper xterm compatibility). In practice, that’s
probably why xfce4-terminal “just works” for me.
Because of that, and the fact I personally see clicking links as a “must have” and a keyboard mode to open links a “nice to have”, and not the other way around, I’m moving back to xfce4-terminal.
I like lightweight and minimalist programs, but I like convenience as well. xfce4-terminal is the perfect balance for me, and it’s pretty strongly on the lightweight side already!