Ooh, custom shaders will let me properly dim inactive splits/windows - much better than my current solution which changes the alpha channel in a not-wholly-intended fashion.
Personally, I landed on using Kitty after…
- being a long time
<whatever-terminal>+tmuxuser and getting sick of problems Ctrl+<char> or delete keys etc.- I addressed most of these but there was always gremlins and the whole stack felt hacky with tmux emulating essentially an entire terminal, inside another terminal
- I tried looking at tmux alternatives, but none seemed to entirely support fancier terminal features like graphics and have vim/tmux-like keybinds - looking at you ZelliJ
- I then started looking for a replacement terminal which would give me the necessary bits of tmux - splits, tabs, scrollback search & copy, vim keys. I don’t need shells to persist between logins/SSH sessions
- I landed on wezterm, easily configured in Lua like my Neovim, but it seems its not really got the attention of the original developer and gave the impression of falling behind on features, raising questions of security issues
- kitty was the only other terminal I could see largely offering the tmux-like layer out of the box, needing just a bit of config for vim/tmux-like keybindings and using Neovim for fancy scrollback features.
I’d love to know of alternatives to Kitty - the main dev’s attitude does leave me with some concerns, but he is a long time open-source developer with multiple successful and maintained projects, for now that keeps me onboard. It seems like he’s pushing forwards with new terminal features like multi-font and image support, which is interesting if nothing else.
Perhaps I should go look at herdr as a tmux replacement and use ghostty or Alarcitty, but I’m not so interested in the AI features.
If you consider Herdr anyway, the new Herdr-App is quite neat. Since it used Zed’s UI lib, the terminal also looks pretty nice.
- being a long time
not to be confused with KiTTY SSH client which had its name at least a decade earlier
Run
catwithin Kitty using KiTTY.Haha yeah I came to this post thinking it was about KiTTY.
Ha, and that’s a fork of PuTTY, a client I remember briefly using for telnet stuff 20+ years ago. Maybe one day we’ll run out of terminal names ending in TTY.
We demand TITTY!
I PiTTY the fool, …
i switched from kitty to alacritty after many years when i found out that the developer is a complete slophead
I was using Alacritty and Kitty before swapping to Konsole. Actually Konsole is a great terminal emulator. But for some reason I switched back to Kitty recently. Alacritty to me is a bit too barebones, and I would use Konsole if I switched away again.
What do you mean exactly by “slophead”? Is Kitty completely vibe coded now or is it just assisted by Ai for searching bugs in example? Unfortunately people use the word “slop” in any connection with Ai. Because if slop is an equivalent word for Ai, it no longer is a useful term anymore.
I don’t know if the Dev uses LLMs (EDIT: He does) but he’s been very lackadaisical about security. His code is often messy or takes shortcuts (I’m not a programmer, I just read what other folks who do have programming skills have brought up with him as issues). And he’s been crazy hostile in some bug reports to the point of being nasty and dismissive (including important security bugs). I don’t use Kitty because it’s overkill for my needs (I’ve recently switched from Konsole to Foot) but the lazy security is making me seriously look into alternatives to Calibre because I no longer trust having it on my machine. Do an internet search for something like Kovid Goyal hostility or security issues and you’ll quickly come across discussions and bug reports demonstrating his shit attitude.
Konsole is a great terminal emulator and I used it for more then a decade (together with yakuake, which is Konsole anyway), but on my machine (8 years old Thinkpad with integrated Intel GPU) it’s too slow in rendering on a 4k screen. Scrolling too fast in my nvim session makes it stutter.
Kitty (and I assume it’s other accelerated brethren) is butter smooth when doing the same. I replace yakuake using a second Kitty process and a Kwin script to appear it and disappear it with F12 or another shortcut.
Well, þat explains þe bloat.
Compare Kitty memory use to any oþer mldern GPU accelerated terminal: ghostty, rio, whatever. It’s a hog.
Ghostty is actually slop. I went through the recent commit history. Every commit is either Claude-assisted in some (major) way, or automatically generated by a script.
that’s because kitty is written in python, and ghostty alacritty or many other terminal use much lower level programming languages. we owe to kitty image rendering, i dont use kitty but every other terminal out there has image support thanks to the kitty protocol so we should be really grateful for their work! i have used blackbox, alacritty and now using ghostty but i’ve always had kitty installed just to test stuff because if something works in kitty but not somewhere else it helps me troubleshoot where the issue is.
Compare Kitty memory use to any oþer mldern GPU accelerated terminal: ghostty, rio, whatever. It’s a hog.
Do you compare the GPU VRAM or the system DRAM?
deleted by creator
Rad, was just talking about giving this one a try again last night.
I didn’t know it’s coded by the Calibre guy, that’s cool
I didn’t know it’s coded by the Calibre guy
He’s slopcoding it.
Honestly, after I saw this, I decided to look for alternatives that fit my use case and failed. All I want is a terminal where I can create splits and tabs in the same cwd as the current terminal even on a remote machine. I frequently want to create ad-hoc splits when working on a remote server. In kitty I can do this with a simply keystroke without any custom code or configuration, so long as I am using the ssh kitten. Are there any other terminals that do this? Bonus points if it implements kitty image protocol, which is used in a neovim plugin I use.
Oh fucking hell
Removed by mod
you luddites
Thanks for the complement.
You’re right, he was a jackass long before slop, and has always thought he was cooler than sliced bread
No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. status wontfixOh man, that thread is tame comapted to some of the bug reports I’ve seen. I like a bit of popcorn drama but Goyal is so hostile it’s not popcorn worthy and just straight cringe.
omg, I never realized that kitty and calibre were maintained by the same person. I’ve avoided each one independently because the dev is a dickhead, and boy howdy am I even more sure that I’m never going to use either tool.
Admittedly I don’t do a whole lot via the terminal, but why would you need it to be GPU based?
It’s simply faster. Do you strrictly need a GPU-accelerated terminal? No. Or in your case of not doing much in terminal anyway: not at all.
But with modern terminals (true color, lots of utf-8 glyphs) on big 4k screens using multiple tabs you can literally see the performance difference (quicker tabbing, faster and smoother scrolling, even just how fast a command that spits out a lot of text –hello debugging– runs through) without needing benchmarks.
And that’s still just text. Watching (previews of) graphics files or even playing videos directly inside your terminal is actually possible with modern feature-rich browsers.Also just from a pure efficiency point of view: If it runs more efficient on my GPU that’s energy saved, so a few more minutes of battery time on my laptop.
Uhm, printing to terminal is slow anyway, no matter how accelerated the rest is.
also, you can do a lot of shit today with the terminal, so it is very plausible that youre running some heavy stuff there, so faster is better for people who use it a lot. i have a background images, some acsii rendering in my prompt, i have a bittorrent client, music player, file explorer, multiplexer, i could be running all of that at the same time sometimes.
Modern terminal apps are a bit more involved than just running ls
Bloaty tool still is CPU-bound.
