8 ms·

Kitty 0.17 – GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

76 points by selrond 7y ago

unixhero 7y ago
Not to be confused with Kitty[0], a Putty fork. Also a terminal emulator! [0] http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md
- fnord123 7y ago
  Holy cow I really thought this was about the putty fork.
  - bspammer 7y ago
    There are only so many words in the english language ending in tty I suppose.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      It hadn't even occurred to me Putty was named that based on the word containing tty.
      - loeg 7y ago
        It's literally branded PuTTY in all of the website, UI, etc.
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  The relevant Github issue is also quite memorable: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-418566309 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41... I wonder if the author might be willing to reconsider. He should have newfound appreciation for how annoying name collisions can be.
  - pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
    Ah, so he kept his attitude from back when he refused to fix security vulnerabilities in Calibre. Good to know. I'll keep avoiding his software.
    - voxl 7y ago
      I can't think of anything more petty or pathetic then taking the side of a mob that demands an open source developer change the name of the software he makes in his free time. People talk about entitlement in games but here you are not even paying or even having a pretense of sponsoring. Just gross.
      - pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
        I don't even particularly care if he changes the name or not. If he makes decisions on the basis of spiting as many people as possible, he reveals himself to be a foolish and irresponsible individual. Unfortunately it's not even the first such incident, and as far as I can see, he learned nothing from the last one. That is a perfectly valid reason to avoid his software. What am I supposed to do, send all my life's savings to a project that I have no reason to expect will deliver quality? (“Criticising me for punching your face really shows your entitlement. You don't pay me to choose whom I punch in the face. You have no right to tell me how I spend my free time!”) Also, mobs occasionally have a point. The opposite of the ‘five billion flies’ fallacy is still a fallacy.
  - georgyo 7y ago
    It's very sad that the name was not changed. It is his right not to change it, but it is to the detriment of the community of both emulators.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    I’ve been happily using kitty for ages, but this butthurt “you hurt my feelings, so I am going to do the opposite” is very childish, immature and offputting.
  - 7y ago
merricksb 7y ago
A discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915829
jhasse 7y ago
I really like kitty, but I always wonder how people can live without a scrollbar or smooth scrolling in general. Unfortunately that's a dealbreaker for me.
- Hackbraten 7y ago
  According to the website, isn’t smooth scrolling exactly what kitty offers?
  - jhasse 7y ago
    This is what I mean: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1123 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1123
- photonios 7y ago
  I use tmux in kitty. I rarely have to scroll and when I do, I can certainely do without smooth scrolling. Usually I just use tmux to search and jump through the output. I was a heavy terminal user already but running macOS at work and linux at home, I got really annoyed by having to memorize different shortcuts. So I just gave up and started using tmux. Now, no matter what platform I am on, the behaviour is pretty much the same. I just use Kitty because it performs really well.
  - rsify 7y ago
    FYI you can configure mouse wheel (or in my case just trackpad) scrolling in tmux [1], I've had this configured for years and it's worked really well for me. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehanchoi.com/quick-fixes-for-tmux-2-1-on-osx/#enablingmousesupport https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehan...
    - photonios 7y ago
      Unfortunately, that breaks scrolling in VIM, which I also use. I do use scrolling with the track pad in VIM sometimes and I care more about that than scrolling in my terminal. Maybe I should try re-enabling it again. It's been a while. Maybe tmux or VIM fixed this.
bjakubski 7y ago
I've recently made a switch to Kitty from iterm2. I couldn't suffer general slowness and visible lag when using vim or nvim anymore. Various solutions and workarounds provided only minimal relief. With kitty the performance improvement was dramatic. Configuration is more involved (config file), but I've managed to set everything up as I'm used to in short time. I'm happy so far, but ymmv
- jamil7 7y ago
  Huh, I switched to Kitty a year or so ago and then back to iTerm when they introduced GPU acceleration. Turning off ligatures made nvm much more responsive for me.
- climb_stealth 7y ago
  Similar situation here. At some point opening/closing tabs got really slow for me in iterm2 and I couldn't find a way around it. With kitty it's pretty much instant and for me worth the lack of other features. Also, a whole lot of it is written in Python and I actually contributed smaller changes in pull requests. It feels good to be able to just change things.
- camgunz 7y ago
  I did this too and used kitty for maybe more than a year. I recently switched to gvim and using :terminal though; the font rendering is better and actually I think it's even faster. Give it a try. P.S. weirdly on Linux it's entirely opposite; vim in an xterm is much faster than gvim.
albertzeyer 7y ago
Btw, if the author (Kovid Goyal) reads this: You really should update your homepage (https://kovidgoyal.net/ https://kovidgoyal.net/). It gives me a warning: > W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site.I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6 And it states: > It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.4. I was not quite sure if this was a joke, or if the homepage was really not updated for such a long time (it says "Created by Kovid Goyal © 2003"). Anyway, for minimal work, I think you can simply remove the warning, and this statement about IE6/Mozilla 1.4, because as far as I can see, everything works fine. Edit: Ah, in the 2018 thread, someone noticed the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093
- outadoc 7y ago
  Looking at the rest of the website, I think it fits with its theme... I don't think it's been majorly updated at all since 2003.
robotmay 7y ago
How does this compare to Alacritty on Linux? I've been pretty happy with Alacritty for the past few years but I'm always interested in trying new things.
- dijit 7y ago
  Alacritty is inspired by kitty; kitty being GPU accelerated (and alacritty also being GPU accelerated). The major difference between them is that alacritty is written in rust (and has a really nice config that auto-reloads) and kitty is written in C with a smattering of python.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    I think Alacritty was first. At least it became popular first.
    - dijit 7y ago
      Seems you are right, I always assumed alacritty was derived from the ideas in kitty (and hence the name being similar) first commit in alacritty: Sun Feb 21 08:15:41 2016 -0800 first commit in kitty: Fri Oct 14 12:33:27 2016 +0530
      - kristofferc 7y ago
        The names are similar because they both do a wordplay on TTY (teletypewriter)
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  Kitty is very feature rich, while alacritty seemed to have very few features in comparison, last time I checked.
  - diggan 7y ago
    As someone who is currently using Alacritty, and been since it first appeared on HN (years ago?), what specific features are you missing in Alacritty that Kitty has?
kabacha 7y ago
I've been using Kitty with Xonsh shell on Qtile dekstop and Qutebrowser browser for over a year now. What a time to be a Python dev!
blinkingled 7y ago
Kitty is good but the only issue I have is the use of custom terminfo xterm-kitty. This means things break when ssh’ing to older Linux until you copy the terminfo manually. On BSDs it doesn’t work as there is no terminfo support.
- floatboth 7y ago
  > On BSDs it doesn’t work as there is no terminfo support ncurses from FreeBSD Ports is built with terminfo, but the ncurses from base uses termcap. Kind of a mess :) Most application ports have USES=ncurses without arguments, which means they will prefer the ports ncurses — if it's installed at build time. Official binary packages are built without it installed of course. So rebuilding the ncurses apps you care about would make them use terminfo. Also you can convert terminfo to termcap: https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/infotocap.1m.html https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/infotocap.1m.html
  - blinkingled 7y ago
    Awesome! I will try infotocap and rebuild ncurses from ports along with any other apps and see. Thanks.
- Strum355 7y ago
  Doing `export TERM=xterm` has worked consistently for me
  - blinkingled 7y ago
    Yep it works for the most part - I remember having weird issues once in a while - not sure if it was build from git kitty that I was using or some TERM compatibility thing.
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      It's pretty much always the case in such situations that the terminal emulator is not XTerm and the "xterm" entry in termcap/terminfo simply does not describe it.
jwr 7y ago
Hmm. I tried it and I'm trying to find reasons why this is better than Apple's default Terminal.app? It's obviously better than iterm2, but Apple's built-in terminal is actually rather fast.
- dh-g 7y ago
  Depends on your usage but terminal.app is quite a bit slower then iterm2's metal renderer or Alacritty (probably kitty as well but I haven't used it).
  - lloeki 7y ago
    "Slower" is not a metric. Latency is, though, and Terminal.app is a top contender (and rips iterm2 to shreds, even in throughput, not that throughput matters in practice). Please stop spreading cargo cult information dating from 10.4 days. Terminal.app has been great ever since 10.6. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/
  - pfranz 7y ago
    I don't think I've seen issues in practice, but I thought last time I saw benchmarks Terminal.app blew away the others. I believe it used some non-standard method to render to screen.
- jhrmnn 7y ago
  I was a happy user of Terminal.app until I got a 4K display, which I run at scaled 2.5K, so effectively rendering 7.5K. With my Macbook Air 2018, this results for example in a FPS of ~13 when scrolling full-screen in Vim with Terminal.app rendering on a CPU, which is super annoying. Kitty brings this to ~35.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I've been using Terminal.app for years (I used iTerm2 before Terminal.app had some major improvements). I switched to Kitty so I could bind a shortcut key to opening a new terminal window--a habit I picked up from tiling window managers. I can't remember if I had other criteria, but Kitty has been surprisingly a quiet workhorse since I switched (I occasionally had TERM issues when ssh-ing).
checkyoursudo 7y ago
I like kitty because it has ligature support. I haven't found many terminal emulators in the Gentoo repository that have both ligature support and are DE-independent. That's pretty much the main reason I use kitty.
quotemstr 7y ago
I really like how kitty addresses the weird compatibility issues of bce [1] by providing a facility to just do character cell property modifications in an efficient and correct way [2]. I wish ncurses were more eager to adopt descriptions of innovations in terminal emulator design. [1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/160#issuecomment-346470545 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/160#issuecomment-... [2] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol-extensions.html#ext-styles https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol-extensions.html#ext...
- JdeBP 7y ago
  The problem with BCE is largely that it does not fit with the paradigms of ncurses and terminfo, not that it is problematic in itself. This is alas true of a large number of terminal things, from function keys through "cursor addressing mode" to erasure, whose ncurses/terminfo abstractions do not fit the actual ways that these work. On both real (DEC) terminals and terminal emulators, background colour erase is settable off and on, with DECECM; so a full-screen application can set the behaviour and know what the colour is going to be, leading to more efficient screen redraws. The ncurses/terminfo model, in contrast, is that the behaviour is fixed on or off, and a boolean (named bce) in the database tells softwares which it is for any given terminal type. In reality, it is the paradigms of ncurses and terminfo that are the problems here. * http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MEANING http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MEAN...
aaaaarghZombies 7y ago
Been using kitty for a bit, I essentially wanted to be able to render emojis in nvim. I haven't really thought about it since installing which is a good sign.
einpoklum 7y ago
With due respect - this sounds like the terminal emulator equivalent of a ricer car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner "fast"? What, terminal emulation is slow now? Needs hardware acceleration? Be serious. A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering.
- jstimpfle 7y ago
  Not just terminals. So much software is unbearably slow today. Definitely terminals. The only terminal I can really stand is xterm with bitmap fonts. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ > A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering. I've mostly done OpenGL recently, and I think xterm (which is fast) is an exception in that it uses just X11 primitives, but I also know that some font frawing APIs are very slow. GDI is what I have in mind mostly. So using Hardware more directly (i.e. OpenGL) might be not the worst idea.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    Wow, those graphs are mind-blowing! But it sounds like what should really be written is a fast, hardware-backed, low-latency but limited-feature graphics library. Then have your terminal use that. I still say that direct awareness of the hardware is _way_ too much coupling.
    - jstimpfle 7y ago
      OpenGL is actually pretty high-level. I don't know how much detail of the hardware it lets you get - probably mostly through hardware-specific extensions. The most basic usage is really hardware oblivious. There are many even more high-level toolkits on top of that, such as Qt. But if you need some flexibility and performance, using OpenGL is probably your best bet.
      - camgunz 7y ago
ecopoesis 7y ago
The standout feature Kitty has for me is keeping its config in a regular text file, so like all my other basic tools it can be configured from my dotfiles repo and a simple setup script. So much simpler then fussing with iTerm’s plist.
jstimpfle 7y ago
How can I tell if this is interesting to me without actually compiling and running it? Are there any screenshots or videos? Any benchmarks?
- Shorel 7y ago
  Using Ubuntu I was only a `sudo apt install` away from running it.
easel 7y ago
Kitty has the best intersection of performance, platform support, and features i have found. It’s not without warts, and doesn’t support windows (yet) but one can dream.
nvarsj 7y ago
On Mac at least, kitty seems to be the best terminal option. It's fast/low latency, has no font rendering issues, and fully supports ligatures (iterm2, alacritty, all have issues in my experience). It also works well with tmux.
Shorel 7y ago
Testing it now. I have to learn a few new shortcuts, but I am quite satisfied so far, it does all things I want in a terminal that Alacritty did not, like tabs and transparency.

76 points by selrond 7y ago

Not to be confused with Kitty[0], a Putty fork. Also a terminal emulator! [0] http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md

fnord123 7y ago
Holy cow I really thought this was about the putty fork.
- bspammer 7y ago
  There are only so many words in the english language ending in tty I suppose.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    It hadn't even occurred to me Putty was named that based on the word containing tty.
    - loeg 7y ago
      It's literally branded PuTTY in all of the website, UI, etc.
KarlKemp 7y ago
The relevant Github issue is also quite memorable: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-418566309 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41... I wonder if the author might be willing to reconsider. He should have newfound appreciation for how annoying name collisions can be.
- pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
  Ah, so he kept his attitude from back when he refused to fix security vulnerabilities in Calibre. Good to know. I'll keep avoiding his software.
  - voxl 7y ago
    I can't think of anything more petty or pathetic then taking the side of a mob that demands an open source developer change the name of the software he makes in his free time. People talk about entitlement in games but here you are not even paying or even having a pretense of sponsoring. Just gross.
    - pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
      I don't even particularly care if he changes the name or not. If he makes decisions on the basis of spiting as many people as possible, he reveals himself to be a foolish and irresponsible individual. Unfortunately it's not even the first such incident, and as far as I can see, he learned nothing from the last one. That is a perfectly valid reason to avoid his software. What am I supposed to do, send all my life's savings to a project that I have no reason to expect will deliver quality? (“Criticising me for punching your face really shows your entitlement. You don't pay me to choose whom I punch in the face. You have no right to tell me how I spend my free time!”) Also, mobs occasionally have a point. The opposite of the ‘five billion flies’ fallacy is still a fallacy.
- georgyo 7y ago
  It's very sad that the name was not changed. It is his right not to change it, but it is to the detriment of the community of both emulators.
- dkersten 7y ago
  I’ve been happily using kitty for ages, but this butthurt “you hurt my feelings, so I am going to do the opposite” is very childish, immature and offputting.
- 7y ago

merricksb 7y ago

A discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915829

jhasse 7y ago

I really like kitty, but I always wonder how people can live without a scrollbar or smooth scrolling in general. Unfortunately that's a dealbreaker for me.

Hackbraten 7y ago
According to the website, isn’t smooth scrolling exactly what kitty offers?
- jhasse 7y ago
  This is what I mean: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1123 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1123
photonios 7y ago
I use tmux in kitty. I rarely have to scroll and when I do, I can certainely do without smooth scrolling. Usually I just use tmux to search and jump through the output. I was a heavy terminal user already but running macOS at work and linux at home, I got really annoyed by having to memorize different shortcuts. So I just gave up and started using tmux. Now, no matter what platform I am on, the behaviour is pretty much the same. I just use Kitty because it performs really well.
- rsify 7y ago
  FYI you can configure mouse wheel (or in my case just trackpad) scrolling in tmux [1], I've had this configured for years and it's worked really well for me. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehanchoi.com/quick-fixes-for-tmux-2-1-on-osx/#enablingmousesupport https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehan...
  - photonios 7y ago
    Unfortunately, that breaks scrolling in VIM, which I also use. I do use scrolling with the track pad in VIM sometimes and I care more about that than scrolling in my terminal. Maybe I should try re-enabling it again. It's been a while. Maybe tmux or VIM fixed this.

bjakubski 7y ago

I've recently made a switch to Kitty from iterm2. I couldn't suffer general slowness and visible lag when using vim or nvim anymore. Various solutions and workarounds provided only minimal relief. With kitty the performance improvement was dramatic. Configuration is more involved (config file), but I've managed to set everything up as I'm used to in short time. I'm happy so far, but ymmv

jamil7 7y ago
Huh, I switched to Kitty a year or so ago and then back to iTerm when they introduced GPU acceleration. Turning off ligatures made nvm much more responsive for me.
climb_stealth 7y ago
Similar situation here. At some point opening/closing tabs got really slow for me in iterm2 and I couldn't find a way around it. With kitty it's pretty much instant and for me worth the lack of other features. Also, a whole lot of it is written in Python and I actually contributed smaller changes in pull requests. It feels good to be able to just change things.
camgunz 7y ago
I did this too and used kitty for maybe more than a year. I recently switched to gvim and using :terminal though; the font rendering is better and actually I think it's even faster. Give it a try. P.S. weirdly on Linux it's entirely opposite; vim in an xterm is much faster than gvim.

albertzeyer 7y ago

Btw, if the author (Kovid Goyal) reads this: You really should update your homepage (https://kovidgoyal.net/ https://kovidgoyal.net/). It gives me a warning: > W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site.I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6 And it states: > It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.4. I was not quite sure if this was a joke, or if the homepage was really not updated for such a long time (it says "Created by Kovid Goyal © 2003"). Anyway, for minimal work, I think you can simply remove the warning, and this statement about IE6/Mozilla 1.4, because as far as I can see, everything works fine. Edit: Ah, in the 2018 thread, someone noticed the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093

outadoc 7y ago
Looking at the rest of the website, I think it fits with its theme... I don't think it's been majorly updated at all since 2003.

robotmay 7y ago

How does this compare to Alacritty on Linux? I've been pretty happy with Alacritty for the past few years but I'm always interested in trying new things.

dijit 7y ago
Alacritty is inspired by kitty; kitty being GPU accelerated (and alacritty also being GPU accelerated). The major difference between them is that alacritty is written in rust (and has a really nice config that auto-reloads) and kitty is written in C with a smattering of python.
- floatboth 7y ago
  I think Alacritty was first. At least it became popular first.
  - dijit 7y ago
    Seems you are right, I always assumed alacritty was derived from the ideas in kitty (and hence the name being similar) first commit in alacritty: Sun Feb 21 08:15:41 2016 -0800 first commit in kitty: Fri Oct 14 12:33:27 2016 +0530
    - kristofferc 7y ago
      The names are similar because they both do a wordplay on TTY (teletypewriter)
pmoriarty 7y ago
Kitty is very feature rich, while alacritty seemed to have very few features in comparison, last time I checked.
- diggan 7y ago
  As someone who is currently using Alacritty, and been since it first appeared on HN (years ago?), what specific features are you missing in Alacritty that Kitty has?

kabacha 7y ago

I've been using Kitty with Xonsh shell on Qtile dekstop and Qutebrowser browser for over a year now. What a time to be a Python dev!

blinkingled 7y ago

Kitty is good but the only issue I have is the use of custom terminfo xterm-kitty. This means things break when ssh’ing to older Linux until you copy the terminfo manually. On BSDs it doesn’t work as there is no terminfo support.

floatboth 7y ago
> On BSDs it doesn’t work as there is no terminfo support ncurses from FreeBSD Ports is built with terminfo, but the ncurses from base uses termcap. Kind of a mess :) Most application ports have USES=ncurses without arguments, which means they will prefer the ports ncurses — if it's installed at build time. Official binary packages are built without it installed of course. So rebuilding the ncurses apps you care about would make them use terminfo. Also you can convert terminfo to termcap: https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/infotocap.1m.html https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/infotocap.1m.html
- blinkingled 7y ago
  Awesome! I will try infotocap and rebuild ncurses from ports along with any other apps and see. Thanks.
Strum355 7y ago
Doing `export TERM=xterm` has worked consistently for me
- blinkingled 7y ago
  Yep it works for the most part - I remember having weird issues once in a while - not sure if it was build from git kitty that I was using or some TERM compatibility thing.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    It's pretty much always the case in such situations that the terminal emulator is not XTerm and the "xterm" entry in termcap/terminfo simply does not describe it.

jwr 7y ago

Hmm. I tried it and I'm trying to find reasons why this is better than Apple's default Terminal.app? It's obviously better than iterm2, but Apple's built-in terminal is actually rather fast.

dh-g 7y ago
Depends on your usage but terminal.app is quite a bit slower then iterm2's metal renderer or Alacritty (probably kitty as well but I haven't used it).
- lloeki 7y ago
  "Slower" is not a metric. Latency is, though, and Terminal.app is a top contender (and rips iterm2 to shreds, even in throughput, not that throughput matters in practice). Please stop spreading cargo cult information dating from 10.4 days. Terminal.app has been great ever since 10.6. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/
- pfranz 7y ago
  I don't think I've seen issues in practice, but I thought last time I saw benchmarks Terminal.app blew away the others. I believe it used some non-standard method to render to screen.
jhrmnn 7y ago
I was a happy user of Terminal.app until I got a 4K display, which I run at scaled 2.5K, so effectively rendering 7.5K. With my Macbook Air 2018, this results for example in a FPS of ~13 when scrolling full-screen in Vim with Terminal.app rendering on a CPU, which is super annoying. Kitty brings this to ~35.
pfranz 7y ago
I've been using Terminal.app for years (I used iTerm2 before Terminal.app had some major improvements). I switched to Kitty so I could bind a shortcut key to opening a new terminal window--a habit I picked up from tiling window managers. I can't remember if I had other criteria, but Kitty has been surprisingly a quiet workhorse since I switched (I occasionally had TERM issues when ssh-ing).

checkyoursudo 7y ago

I like kitty because it has ligature support. I haven't found many terminal emulators in the Gentoo repository that have both ligature support and are DE-independent. That's pretty much the main reason I use kitty.

quotemstr 7y ago

I really like how kitty addresses the weird compatibility issues of bce [1] by providing a facility to just do character cell property modifications in an efficient and correct way [2]. I wish ncurses were more eager to adopt descriptions of innovations in terminal emulator design. [1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/160#issuecomment-346470545 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/160#issuecomment-... [2] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol-extensions.html#ext-styles https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol-extensions.html#ext...

JdeBP 7y ago
The problem with BCE is largely that it does not fit with the paradigms of ncurses and terminfo, not that it is problematic in itself. This is alas true of a large number of terminal things, from function keys through "cursor addressing mode" to erasure, whose ncurses/terminfo abstractions do not fit the actual ways that these work. On both real (DEC) terminals and terminal emulators, background colour erase is settable off and on, with DECECM; so a full-screen application can set the behaviour and know what the colour is going to be, leading to more efficient screen redraws. The ncurses/terminfo model, in contrast, is that the behaviour is fixed on or off, and a boolean (named bce) in the database tells softwares which it is for any given terminal type. In reality, it is the paradigms of ncurses and terminfo that are the problems here. * http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MEANING http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MEAN...

aaaaarghZombies 7y ago

Been using kitty for a bit, I essentially wanted to be able to render emojis in nvim. I haven't really thought about it since installing which is a good sign.

einpoklum 7y ago

With due respect - this sounds like the terminal emulator equivalent of a ricer car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner "fast"? What, terminal emulation is slow now? Needs hardware acceleration? Be serious. A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering.

jstimpfle 7y ago
Not just terminals. So much software is unbearably slow today. Definitely terminals. The only terminal I can really stand is xterm with bitmap fonts. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ > A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering. I've mostly done OpenGL recently, and I think xterm (which is fast) is an exception in that it uses just X11 primitives, but I also know that some font frawing APIs are very slow. GDI is what I have in mind mostly. So using Hardware more directly (i.e. OpenGL) might be not the worst idea.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Wow, those graphs are mind-blowing! But it sounds like what should really be written is a fast, hardware-backed, low-latency but limited-feature graphics library. Then have your terminal use that. I still say that direct awareness of the hardware is _way_ too much coupling.
  - jstimpfle 7y ago
    OpenGL is actually pretty high-level. I don't know how much detail of the hardware it lets you get - probably mostly through hardware-specific extensions. The most basic usage is really hardware oblivious. There are many even more high-level toolkits on top of that, such as Qt. But if you need some flexibility and performance, using OpenGL is probably your best bet.
    - camgunz 7y ago

ecopoesis 7y ago

The standout feature Kitty has for me is keeping its config in a regular text file, so like all my other basic tools it can be configured from my dotfiles repo and a simple setup script. So much simpler then fussing with iTerm’s plist.

jstimpfle 7y ago

How can I tell if this is interesting to me without actually compiling and running it? Are there any screenshots or videos? Any benchmarks?

Shorel 7y ago
Using Ubuntu I was only a `sudo apt install` away from running it.

easel 7y ago

Kitty has the best intersection of performance, platform support, and features i have found. It’s not without warts, and doesn’t support windows (yet) but one can dream.

nvarsj 7y ago

On Mac at least, kitty seems to be the best terminal option. It's fast/low latency, has no font rendering issues, and fully supports ligatures (iterm2, alacritty, all have issues in my experience). It also works well with tmux.

Shorel 7y ago

Testing it now. I have to learn a few new shortcuts, but I am quite satisfied so far, it does all things I want in a terminal that Alacritty did not, like tabs and transparency.