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I've been using Kitty for a month now. I really like it. It's slightly less usable out of the box than iTerm 2. The default shortcuts are very counterintuitive
by adamch 8y ago
I've been using Kitty for a month now. I really like it. It's slightly less usable out of the box than iTerm 2. The default shortcuts are very counterintuitive (no CMD T for new tab or CMD W to close tab). But editing the preferences is straightforward.
I prefer it to iTerm because it's so. Damn. Fast. It's the only software (besides Sublime) I run on my laptop that actually feels like it's using the 40 years of transistor improvements I'm paying for.
I know iTerm recently added a Metal renderer but I need ligature support, which iTerm Metal doesn't have.
Maintainer has also been responsive on GitHub.
- murukesh_s 8y agoFrom a marketing perspective I was wondering how did you discover it one month back? Product hunt? or here itself ?
- laumars 8y agoIt's been meantioned on here a few times in conversation. That's how I stumbled across Kitty.
- iokanuon 8y agoIt's easy to find if you search for terminal emulators with low latency.
- 1996 8y agoDifferent conclusion for the same article: I picked mlterm https://anarc.at/blog/2018-05-04-terminal-emulators-2/ https://anarc.at/blog/2018-05-04-terminal-emulators-2/
- Iem3ohvi 8y agoIt has been listed on the arch wiki under their list of available terminal emulators for a long time and I often use the wiki to look up things even when having to configure things on non-arch systems.
- SSLy 8y agohttps://lwn.net/Articles/753029/ https://lwn.net/Articles/753029/
- adamch 8y agoI wanted to try a new terminal, so I looked up the terminal latency comparison article that was making the rounds a few months ago. Of the ones that ran on OSX, Kitty seemed to be worth trying.
- ryenus 8y agoHave you managed to configure it to behave similar to iTerm 2 in terms of keyboard shortcuts? Would you please share your config? One thing is, I don't get its layout, is it possible to create a vertical/horizontal split like what (shift+)cmd+d does in iTerm 2?
- ikornaselur 8y agoThat's something I really need as well - I like how fast kitty is compared to iterm2, but I'm just so used to using the splits in iterm2 + using a global keyboard shortcut to show and hide the terminal. I couldn't find anything similar in a quick glance over the config :/
- kungtotte 8y agoFor showing and hiding with a global keyword, couldn't you rely on your DE/WM to handle that for you?
- ikornaselur 8y agoSorry, DE/WM? I assume WM is Window Manager, but can't think of what DE is, except Desktop something? I'm using macOS and unfortunately not familiar with how I'd do that, but I'm sure it would be easy with something like i3wm on linux (which I still miss after moving away from linux 3 years ago :/), but I don't know what I could use in macOS. Maybe I could find some third-party solution just to show/hide a particular application. I think if I had that + if I could figure out tabbing/tiling behaviour of Kitty, I would switch to it. Those two things are the main things that I need from iterm.
- cosmojg 8y agoYou can run a tiling window manager like i3 and xmonad on macOS! See: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
- strunz 8y agoGlobal shortcut to bring up iterm2 is the main reason I use it!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- boobsbr 8y agoWhy do you need ligature support?
- kritixilithos 8y agoAs another user of iTerm2, I am currently using several keyboard mappings from key to key (like Tab being interpreted as Esc), do you know whether Kitty supports that? As far as I can see in the docs, only examples of key to action are shown.
- Synroc 8y agoYou could do that at the macOS level using karabiner for example. I have Caps lock as esc when tapped and Ctrl when held.
- nerdponx 8y agoIt's the only software (besides Sublime) I run on my laptop that actually feels like it's using the 40 years of transistor improvements I'm paying for. I wish more software fell into this category. It's still a little odd to me that something as conceptually simple as a terminal emulator should require a full blown GPU in order to perform smoothly.
- twtw 8y agoWhy? Everything that seems smooth is that way because of the GPU.
- Twirrim 8y agoIt's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware. If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run. It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on something as powerful as hardware acceleration via GPU to make plain text rendering on a screen in a GUI approach the same speed as CPU rendered text in a straight terminal console.
- vanviegen 8y agoTo be fair, the text mode rendering you're using as a benchmark, is implemented in hardware as well.
- cmsj 8y agoIndeed, a more fair comparison is to compare GNOME Terminal to xterm. You should see that xterm is way faster, but it's also uglier and has far fewer features. Overhead isn't always about worthless bloat.
- twtw 8y agoIt's on some crazy high resolution display. If you switch to text mode, your resolution drops a ton, and the required pixel pushing power drops accordingly.
- btschaegg 8y ago> I prefer it to iTerm because it's so. Damn. Fast. Yup, I was also pretty surprised by this. I switched to Kitty recently, after terminology broke for me after an update. It's surprisingly hard to find terminal emulators that run on Xorg and on Wayland without making a fuzz. Kitty does this beautifully and I had a real a-ha moment because of its speed the first time I tried it.
- zegl 8y agoCould you share your config that makes Kitty behave more like iTerm 2?
- jamesgeck0 8y agoDo you use tmux? The tmux/vim combo on MacOS seems to have minimal performance gains when using GPU accelerated terminals, unfortunately.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoI'm having trouble putting this into words without sounding smarmy, so please, that's not my intention. How are you attributing speed to Kitty over iTerm? Wouldn't most of the sluggishness of anything be more attributed to the programs you're running in the terminal?
- btschaegg 8y agoTry it. You'll be surprised. An amazing amount of lag comes from the routines needed to display the text some utility prints, not the utility itself.
- fastball 8y agoiTerm's 2 global hotkey + half screen pane combo has been stuck on it. Not gonna leave until I can do the same with another terminal emu.