I got confused by this post a bit. The news is just about Terminal being packaged for Nix. Checking the whole list, it looks like only the Session is not merged yet? I wonder if it's the moment where I would be able to write:
services.xserver.desktopManager.cosmic.enable = true
I've interpreted their statements as indicating the time for that will likely be in March.
I wonder why they thought it necessary to build a new terminal emulator instead of just skin and contribute to alacritty or wezterm
Development began mid-December, using the work we already did for cosmic-edit as a template. COSMIC Terminal uses the alacritty library, but the frontend interface is designed with our platform toolkit (libcosmic), with full support for bidrectional text and ligatures because we use cosmic-text instead of freetype.
https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111602927867586005
You can see above that between alacritty, cosmic-terminal, and gnome-terminal; cosmic-terminal was the only terminal to render correctly. Since then, we've given it the COSMIC treatment and now we have a tabbed interface with settings, search, etc.
https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111733526892594130
We're still in the process of designing and implementing features, but don't hesitate to try it out!
Kinda seems like they want to have close integration with the rest of the desktop environment and Pop_OS but still remain modular by using the alacritty_terminal framework. I'm sure they are mostly concerned with performance on the System76 laptop hardware.
We built a terminal application for COSMIC DE. COSMIC Terminal (cosmic-term) features bidirectional rendering (left-right and right-left languages), ligatures (æ, for example), desktop themes, syntax themes, and GPU rendering. This terminal emulator was built using the alacritty_terminal framework with a custom renderer based on COSMIC Text, while GPU rendering uses glyphon and wgpu with softbuffer and tiny-skia as a fallback. We were able to optimize this to have performance similar to Alacritty; both in vtebench and when displaying an 8 MB text file.
We’re working on adding mouse emulation and the ability to open hyperlinks in the terminal, as well as ironing out a few wrinkles.