Solutions
Switch terminal without rebuilding your setup
Almost nothing you are afraid of losing lives in your terminal. Your shell, prompt, aliases, functions, PATH, tmux configuration and dotfiles all belong to the shell, not the emulator, so any terminal that opens a real login shell inherits every one of them on first launch with nothing to port.
The reason most developers stay on a terminal they have outgrown is the fear of the migration. Years of zsh configuration, a prompt you tuned, aliases you no longer remember writing, tmux bindings in muscle memory. Trying something new feels like it costs a weekend, so the evaluation never happens and the terminal you picked in 2019 is still the one you open every morning.
What actually lives in the terminal is a short list: the colour scheme, the font, the keyboard shortcuts, and any terminal-specific features you deliberately built on, like iTerm2 triggers, its Python API, or kitty kittens. That last group is the only real migration cost, and most people have none of it. Everything else follows the shell. Forkbench runs a generic PTY in every tab, which is the same thing your current terminal does, so zsh or fish starts the way it always has and tmux runs inside it unchanged.
How it works
- 1Install Forkbench and open a tab. Your shell starts with your prompt, PATH and aliases already in place, because they come from your dotfiles.
- 2Run the things you would miss: tmux, vim, fzf, lazygit, a long build. They behave as they do now.
- 3Keep your old terminal installed. There is no lock-in to test around, and nothing about your dotfiles has changed.
- 4Move one real piece of work over for a week, not a toy project, because the difference shows up in supervision rather than in typing.
- 5Port only the terminal-specific things you actually use, which for most people is a colour scheme and a font size.
Straight about the guarantee: Two things genuinely do not port, and it is worth knowing before you start: terminal-specific automation like iTerm2 triggers or its Python API, and kitty's kittens, have no equivalent in Forkbench. If you rely on those, that is a real cost and you should weigh it rather than discover it.