I rarely use anything new because my work environment is holy, but I tried Kitty because it had a Unicode menu built-in. I like to send unicode smileys to friends on IRC. :)<p>Anyways here are my impressions after 1 month.<p>1. You have to transfer terminfo to all ssh servers because the kitty term does not exist there.<p>2. By default mouse selection with double click + drag to select multiple lines is not normal. I believe this could be fixed but I haven't figured out how yet. (I could not re-create this right now, maybe it was fixed in some recent upgrade)<p>3. Unlike gnome-terminal (my old default) it actually opens up to fullscreen if you used it in fullscreen mode last.<p>4. Unlike gnome-terminal I could immediately figure out how to make it open up a few default tabs like a session on start up.<p>5. Its CLI tools don't accept the same arguments when defining a session, as when using them outside of the session definition. This was barely documented.<p>Overall the impression is good because I'm still using it. I rarely use anything new this long if it has issues affecting my workflow.
I really want to like Kitty, but it's a very opinionated piece of software, and there's a number of decisions that just make it hard to. No GUI config is one, and I can't be arsed to go through multiple cycles of changing a config file, checking if it is alright, then going back. One particular sticking point for me, even after I got my config going, was that I couldn't resize my tiles with the mouse. This is by design: the author doesn't want it. The keyboard shortcuts for resizing tiles also don't work on an axis level, and you can only make a tile wider or narrower. Obviously, this means you can't configure your arrow keys to resize, as the mental model would break depending on which side of the screen the tile is on. I wanted Kitty because it has ligatures, tiling and GPU rendering, but after fighting with it a tonne, I just gave up and moved on.<p>And that's the thing about opinionated software: if you don't share the opinions it was built with, you're not going to enjoy using it at all. By all means, Kitty is amazing if you get into its model, but for a large portion of the audience I think Konsole or iTerm will just suit you much better.
Kitty is one of those programs you install because you read about some performance improvements and mature feature stack, then completely forget about it in the background. The ideal piece of software. It just works and does the job well enough to be invisible.<p>Likewise I had repeated issues with iTerm breaking or consuming tons of resources for no reason which I had zero interest in debugging.<p>Glad to recommend it to anyone else.<p>...At least on MacOS. On Linux I was very happy with Termite which fit my keyboard-centric linux style <a href="https://github.com/thestinger/termite" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thestinger/termite</a>
Sigh. There's already a project called Kitty. It has been going for many years.<p>It is the feature enhancing fork [0]
[1] of Putty.<p>0, <a href="https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY</a><p>1, <a href="http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md" rel="nofollow">http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md</a>
Kitty's ability to display is quite fun (although it is definitely not the first terminal editor to do so).<p>A while ago I hacked a Julia package together so that functions that emit an image (for example a plot that would usually be displayed in a Jupyter notebook or a new window) show that image in kitty. It's still a bit rough, but it is surprisingly easy to write something integrates with a lot of packages: <a href="https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl</a>
Not much of a contribution to the conversation, but I've been running kitty for ~two years and it has served me really well. It's reliable, fast, great. Only thing I'd wish it had was (more intuitive) way to re-arrange panes / layouts.
I use it. It's nice but it causes a ~30 watt spike in power usage whenever I put it in the foreground. Laptop users, be advised that this terminal could drain your batteries.
I suppose there are only a few words that end in tty, but I was a little surprised this wasn't a GPU enhancement to the already nice Kitty [<a href="http://www.9bis.net/kitty" rel="nofollow">http://www.9bis.net/kitty</a>] which is based on Putty [<a href="https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/" rel="nofollow">https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/</a>], both Windows programs.
Been using kitty for a while now; here are some interesting details about that:<p>- When I change my vim colourscheme, I can have it automatically propagate the new background colour to the terminal to avoid having an ugly border around it. This is specially important when using it with a padding around the edges.<p>- When I switch between light and dark mode (I have a script for that) I can do so by changing a single include statement in a config file and automatically propagate the new colours to all open terminals.<p>- I more easily have a uniform terminal theme as the configuration is done with files which support includes, so I can have the bulk of my configuration in a separate rc-files git repository and only put some local adjustments in the default config file.<p>- The hardware acceleration isn't really all that noticeable.<p>- 256-color support is a clear improvement compared to gnome-terminal, which I used before.<p>- Support for tabs and windows seems pretty ok, but I rarely use it because I'm already used to tmux which works seamlessly over SSH and lets me detach and re-attach sessions. Probably a neat feature if you won't use tmux though.<p>- Zoom in is = instead of +, which means I don't have to press/release the shift key between zooming in and out when looking for the perfect fit.<p>- Being able to set padding and opacity on the fly is pretty neat when you're figuring out a good balance of how much code you want to see on screen at a time.
I'm going to post this as a top-level comment rather than an answer, so that nobody feels under attack. I don't know Kovid other than from being a Calibre user and from reading about him (mostly here on HN). But I do find many of the posts in this discussion, way more insulting and close minded than anything I have read written by him.
I switched to Kitty as it was one of the few terminal emulators that supported font ligatures. So far I'm quite satisfied. It's smooth and fast.
One of my favorite features of Kitty is its support for printing images in the terminal through its graphics protocol, meant to be a replacement for libsixel. The spec's worth a read - there's few projects linked there that implement it.<p><a href="https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html" rel="nofollow">https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html</a>
I use and love Kitty. One of my favorite features is the ability to yank text by word anywhere in the terminal and insert (<a href="https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#shortcut-kitty.Insert-selected-word" rel="nofollow">https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#shortcut-kitty.Ins...</a>). There's also different hints that can be enacted allowing you to narrow your focus to specific items such as paths and URLs: <a href="https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints.html" rel="nofollow">https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints.html</a>.<p>I know that there are TUI tools that could make this easier, but whenever I was working on Kubernetes getting information about constantly changing pods was definitely the place where I yanked/pasted more times than anywhere else.
Just this week I started using kitty as my terminal. Overall I have liked it and I really love the icat kitten so I can "cat" image files directly in my terminal.<p>I haven't yet figured out how to change my font color from white to amber (which has been a preference of mine). I've tried just setting color7 and color15 to the amber hex color that I like, but that isn't doing it.<p>The other thing I can't figure out is how to get it to stop updating the window title. I know most people probably prefer it, I just don't want it to change every time I change directories. There is an obvious preference for that in gnome-terminal and I can't figure it out in kitty.
Check out termite, it is, unlike Kitty, a no-bloat program. As of kitty, just check out it's source repo to get an idea of how messy everything it is, not to mention the horrible attitude of the author, it's like Linus^4
Kitty is indeed great and I can corroborate the high performance by joining at the macOS activity monitor. Almost zero even with high speed scrolling.<p>I kinda wish there was a GUI configuration method though. But considering it's a terminal emulator it's not a big deal.
With the GLAMOR rendering layer, xterm has GPU acceleration. And if you enable the speed hack it's as fast as any terminal emulator. But compared to limping along at 300 or even 9600 baud, all our terminals are plenty fast, so I prefer accuracy over speed.
> You can install pre-built binaries of kitty if you are on macOS or Linux using the following simple command:<p>> curl -L <a href="https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh" rel="nofollow">https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh</a> | sh /dev/stdin<p>This kind of install freaks me out. Who knows what the code could do? What is the uninstall procedure? How do I dry-run and see what changes it wants to make onto my system before accept them? Can they not just offer a .deb, snap, or appimage?
I switched to Neovim as a daily driver last week. The latency, at least on mac, was annoying. Changed terminal emulators to Kitty and now everything is snappy.
... and it's wayland-native!<p>Just a quick question while I'm here - what really is the point of using the GPU? Surely the CPU is adequate for a terminal's modest needs?<p>... I have an NVidia POS on my lappy but I don't game or use the GPU at all - in fact I removed the drivers so it doesn't drain the battery at all.
I dont like their approach in the issue of "Kitty Only uses Dark colors"[1]<p>1. <a href="https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197</a>
I was surprised how easy it was to switch to kitty from xterm. I just copied my colors in, configured cursor/foreground/background/text settings, bam done. Dropped a star on the Github and I'm gonna use this from now on!
for those into these things, i just started using cool-retro-term which i just love working in now :) seems i must still try kitty though (heard good things from the nnn file mamager devs, itself also a sweet project)
My small very unscientific benchmarking on a high spec last gen Macbook pro 13 (partly consisting of watching Activity monitor while scrolling fast) is that Alacritty performs better than Kitty (despite Kittys team claiming the opposite) both in terms of frames per second and in terms of CPU use. Kitty uses maybe 30% more CPU with fast scrolling despite being slower.