Releasing Weztermocil

Tl;DR: I created Weztermocil after switching to Wezterm from iTerm2 and was sorely missing iTermocil after the switch.

I was a fan and user of iTerm2 for years. It was one of the first pieces of software I installed when I got a new Mac. However, more recently, I've felt it feelsg more slugglish than it used to. Like most software that's been around for a long time, it grows and grows, sprouting complexity and inefficiencies, which may contribute to it's bulkier feeling. As someone who spends a decent chunk of time in his terminal, having a snappy experience is kind of important.

When I started at Unsplash, I was introduced to a fantastic tool called iTermocil—inspired by Teamocil—which was a window and pane automation tool built specifically for iTerm2. It was super helpful being able to define terminal layouts declaratively. We have quite a fun things running in parallel at Unsplash to build our web application, so being able to spawn panes with all the necessary commands with a simple call to itermocil was great.

iTerm2 plus iTermocil was great for a while, but after I switched from VSCode to Neovim (and now Helix), the sluggishness of iTerm2 became even more apparent. Long running build and type-checking processes combined with a text editor led to some less desirable behaviours. I'd often find Neovim would have issues refreshing the buffer after switching tabs, and would sometimes just outright hang, forcing me to close the tab.

During the search for a new terminal emulator, I came across Wezterm. It was well regarded, offered configuration through Lua, and seemed to be considered very snappy by the community. It wasn't long after trying it that I was sold. Neovim no longer had visual issues, it felt super responsive in comparison and the portable config made it easy to share setups between my work and personal Macs. The one thing it was missing, though, was iTermocil.

One thing I love about Wezterm, is that it exposes a cli for window and pane manipulation (among other things). In an effort to get something like iTermocil, I hacked together a shell script that would read a JSON file and used the Wezterm cli to build panes (you can find that script on Github, if you're curious).

That shell script was Good Enough™️ but I couldn't help but crave something more robust that was compatible with iTermocil/Teamocil config files.

At the end of 2023 I set out to build a proper version of Weztermocil—mostly as an excuse to learn Rust. 6 months later of on and off hacking, I'm happy to say v0.1.2 has been released!

It's not perfect—I'm positive there are edge cases—and the Rust code behind it will probably make real Rustaceans cringe, but hey, it's a hell of a lot more robust than the shell script I hacked together originally!

You can find the code for Weztermocil on Github. The repo's readme also contains install instructions and details about it's API.

A huge thanks to Rémi Prévost for Teamocil and Tom Anthony for iTermocil as I wouldn't have the strong foundation or idea to build Weztermocil without their work!