37 ms·

Kitty – A fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

385 points by Gedxx 6y ago

GekkePrutser 6y ago
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. I kinda wish there was a GUI configuration method though. But considering it's a terminal emulator it's not a big deal.
- memco 6y ago
  I'm also a macOS Kitty user. The config did take a minute to get used to, but the docs are pretty clear and it's really nice to be able to add the config to your dotfiles repo and have it available on all machines. My favorite feature though is the auto layout: it's really nice to be able to quickly switch to different layouts without having to manually move things and also not have to worry if something is going to fit into the space I have. The perf is nice too! One thing I never figured out was how to properly set the terminal when on remote machines: it defaults to xterm-kitty, which led to problems trying to run nano on those servers. The only thing I dislike is the look of the tabs: compared to the OS native tabs it's a bit underwhelming, but they work fine.
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    For servers that have older versions of ncurses, you can run this command from kitty to install the xterm-kitty terminfo files on the remote host: kitty +kitten ssh user@host
    - memco 6y ago
      Thanks! Seems to resolve the term issue albeit at the cost of having to remember to use the kitten instead of standard SSH.
      - tomjakubowski 6y ago
        Once the terminfo files are installed, unless the target system has restored from a backup or something, you can just revert to using plain ssh. Or you could lobby your sysadmins to update terminfo past version 20181017 and use 'term kitty' in your config. It's too bad the people involved can't agree on using either "xterm-kitty" (Kitty author's preference) or "kitty" (ncurses maintainer's preference) for the TERM value. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879#issuecomment-433664080 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879#issuecomment-...
        JdeBP 6y ago
        See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683277 .
  - em500 6y ago
    Solution is in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-when-sshing-into-a-different-computer https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-...
  - alecthomas 6y ago
    I just add the following to my kitty.conf and have never had any issues with TERM: term xterm-256color
    - minusf 6y ago
      It's usable but i had a lot of issues. Copy pasty looses newlines, redraw issues in mutt, etc. It is absolutely "forbidden" and unsupported by the kitty author to use any other term than xterm-kitty.
      - em500 6y ago
        The author offers a solution in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-when-sshing-into-a-different-computer https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-... Kitty normally identifies itself as 'xterm-kitty' (in the environment variable TERM). The problem is that most terminal programs don't know that terminal type and use some less featured fallback. Most modern terminal implementations use a workaround it by pretending to be 'xterm-256color', with varying degrees of actual compatibility. (That's also what changing term in kitty.conf does). Kitty's author really wants you to use the traditional solution of telling (programs on) the remote host what your terminal is capable of and how to use the capabilities by installing a new terminfo entry in ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-kitty on the remote side, which is what `kitty +kitten ssh [remotehost]` does. (It needs to be done only once, unless the file gets wiped on the remote end).
haecceity 6y ago
icat and diff programs are nice but I've never thought other terminals needed to print or scroll faster.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Then your workflow is different from other people who do need this feature.
  - da39a3ee 6y ago
    Can you explain? I don't understand it either. I use iTerm2 on a modern mac; does that mean I don't have the performance problems being addressed by kitty and alacritty?
    - hurrrrrrrr 6y ago
      It is useful with some badly written build systems that think they have to write every invocation of gcc to stdout. Like every badly written Makefile out there. Or `cat myapp/log/yesterday.log`. You can work around both but it's clunky. And also it's a thing that's not a must have, just a nice(r) to have.
withaplomb 6y ago
tmux -CC mode support? Stuck on macOS for iterm2 as that’s the only terminal that seems to have it.
petepete 6y ago
I've used Kitty daily for years and it's brilliant. It just does the simple things really well and crazy fast. Can't really find fault.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Not that xterm is "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"...
  - petepete 6y ago
    True, but every now and then when you accidentally run tree against your entire ~/projects directory, it finishes in a fraction of a second lag-free. Even my old terminal emulator of choice, urxvt, couldn't match that.
    - Uberphallus 6y ago
      Strange, I always found Kitty (or Alacritty) extremely laggy for those use cases, plus firing up the fan of the computer. Also even though constantly running at 60 FPS, input lag is in the order of 300ms.
kissgyorgy 6y ago
Kitty is the only thing I miss from Linux since I'm using WSL 2.
- augusto-moura 6y ago
  Have you tried running a x11 server on wsl? I heard that it works with a bit of linux-foo, might work for kitty
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  I use kitty on WSL via vcxsrv but I had to hack the OpenGL support. X410 should work.
krzyk 6y ago
How does performance compare to st? Has any one tested both?
- schmuelio 6y ago
  I haven't used a considerable amount of time using st (I think for a total of 2 days on a VM?) I liked st just fine but I found the day-to-day performance of kitty really solid. It feels like kitty takes _slightly_ longer to start up but it's still a tiny amount of time. There's also the different configuration options, kitty has a config file but st (if memory serves) needs to be recompiled for changes. I've found that initially kitty can have trouble rendering fonts with correct spacing but that takes a couple of minutes to tweak to your liking. And I think the colour configurations are a little more complex? I haven't had to change the config for a while though. The GPU acceleration does make stdout much faster if it's unbuffered (in my experience) and on a 144hz monitor it looks so much smoother. Hopefully that's enough of a comparison? Sorry I couldn't give more feedback, as mentioned I've only used st for a short time.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    You can also use kitty -1 to use a single instance of kitty although the startup time is already so small I doubt you could tell the difference without measuring
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    > It feels like kitty takes _slightly_ longer to start up but it's still a tiny amount of time. For me the difference was large enough to switch to st. Kitty's startup takes 5-10 times as long and it's very noticable for me. As I use terminals a lot this meant a delay every time I opened an instance. But this is a subjective thing of course. I have all the features I need with st and use a terminal multiplexer for the rest.
- JNRowe 6y ago
  I use both, but don't really feel like there is a useful comparison. My lightly patched st /feels/ better IME, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same featureset. kitty has its fancier font support and cool kittens which make the comparison very uneven. I limit my kitty use to a single long running instance as my vim terminal, taking advantage of its far better rendering for pretty symbols and inline images via the icat kitten. For everything else I find st/urxvt far more useful, in spite of the occasional rendering errors and font selection problems. Even going so far as to fiddle with sxiv's Xembed support to weakly imitate kitty's icat from time to time.
yewenjie 6y ago
How does this compare with Alacritty?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Alacritty has fewer features (by design) i think. Alacritty is more supposed to be used with something like screen or tmux while Kitty has tabs, splits and so on.
  - shirakawasuna 6y ago
    My understanding with Alacritty is that functionality like tabs would be up to downstream software to implement. So I create a new project called "UltraAwesomeTerminal" and use Alacritty as a library. Is that accurate? I'm kind of unsure.
    - nixpulvis 6y ago
      Our position is that tabs is the job for your window manager. I, for example, run `i3` which makes implementing tabs in Alacritty a non-issue for me.
      - szemet 6y ago
        I use tabbed for Alacritty, it works in any WM. https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
      - shirakawasuna 6y ago
        Thanks for the reply! That makes sense. And sorry for the late response.
- nixpulvis 6y ago
  Perhaps run them both and let us know.
- gavinray 6y ago
  Alacritty + Starship is heaven https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/
Koshkin 6y ago
> Kitty Not gputty? OK, I will call it gpussy, then.
garou 6y ago
I dont like their approach in the issue of "Kitty Only uses Dark colors"[1] 1. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197
- kemayo 6y ago
  Kovid Goyal is a person with forcefully presented opinions. I've submitted bugs to Calibre before, so I can vouch that his style remains the same.
  - garou 6y ago
    Yeah. I've tried the Kitty last year and when my colors showed different I found this Issue already closed and with some strong words/opinions from him. Hard to like it.
    - cosmojg 6y ago
      He's not wrong, though. He's following the spec, and users are asking him to violate it to be compatible with programs which also violate it. If everyone just followed the spec, however, colors would work beautifully for everyone all the time without anyone having to worry about weird edge cases in specific programs. If a program you run in Kitty displays incorrect colors because it's hijacked bolding instead of implementing proper color support, you should absolutely go and make the issue known to the authors of said program as they are the ones who fucked up by violating the spec in the first place. The whole point of standards is to make the relevant technologies more accessible. Developers too often break spec without regard for accessibility, all in the name of cool new features. This is bad, and it makes sense to discourage it by simply enforcing the spec.
      - tangus 6y ago
        The standard says "bold or increased intensity". I see brighter colors on dark background (what everybody does) more in line with it than darker colors on dark background (what Kitty does).
INTPenis 6y ago
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. :) Anyways here are my impressions after 1 month. 1. You have to transfer terminfo to all ssh servers because the kitty term does not exist there. 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) 3. Unlike gnome-terminal (my old default) it actually opens up to fullscreen if you used it in fullscreen mode last. 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. 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. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- flatiron 6y ago
  1) kitty +kitten ssh myserver That solves that.
  - hoistbypetard 6y ago
    As much as I like kitty, that shortcut is the only reason I've continued to use it for the past 18 months. Needing to manually fix it every time I connect to a new VM would've otherwise killed the appeal for me. `+kitten ssh` solves it nicely.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    FWIW that doesn't copy user capabilities; for that use: infocmp -x xterm-kitty | ssh myserver tic -x -o \~/.terminfo /dev/stdin
    - memco 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slobiwan 6y ago
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 [http://www.9bis.net/kitty http://www.9bis.net/kitty] which is based on Putty [https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/], both Windows programs.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
linuxdaemon 6y ago
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. 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. 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.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
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.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Do you have a dual GPU laptop? Kitty uses more CPU than say Konsole but I can't imagine it using 30w - likely it wakes up the dGPU when it shouldn't. I use it all the time on my ThinkPad with iGPU and haven't noticed any big battery differences from when I was using Konsole.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Yes. I have a Clevo laptop with an nvidia GTX 1070 GPU. I'm using the proprietary drivers and have hybrid graphics disabled in the firmware settings. I monitor the power usage of the GPU at all times. It idles at ~8 W and spikes to 30~40 W every time Kitty is in the foreground. That's comparable to running RetroArch with some shaders. The Intel GPU caused kernel panics during video decoding last time I tried using it so I do not have any power usage data for it.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    kitty uses shaders, so I guess that might be it.
wef 6y ago
... and it's wayland-native! 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? ... 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.
unixhero 6y ago
Sigh. There's already a project called Kitty. It has been going for many years. It is the feature enhancing fork [0] [1] of Putty. 0, https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY 1, http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md
- Igelau 6y ago
  The semantic space of software project names is filling up while simultaneously contracting. It's time to accept that all names going forward are going to have collisions and get on with life
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    It's significantly less forgivable when it's another project in the same category of software.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Like that dude who had a go project that bowled over by Google Golang E: found it! https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9
    - mindcrime 6y ago
      To me, that incident was one of the first times I really started thinking "Google really have gone evil". I know, I know... it's "just" a name of a programming language. I don't care: it's the principle of the thing. The name was taken, and the only correct thing for Google to do when he stepped forward, was to change the name. That they chose not to really tarnished their image in my eyes, and still does to this day. It's a shame that the other guy wasn't in a position to / willing to / whatever, sue the pants off of Google at the time.
      - Igelau 6y ago
        Both names are terrible!
Keyframe 6y ago
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.
- knubie 6y ago
  There was a big update recently that added better split pane support. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog.html#id9 https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog.html#id9
  - Keyframe 6y ago
    well, that's it then. No gripes anymore!
- Valord 6y ago
  I have been running Kitty for just as long but never use any layout and pane features. Serious question - why would one want to do window management in their terminal vs something like tmux or screen?
sischoel 6y ago
Kitty's ability to display is quite fun (although it is definitely not the first terminal editor to do so). 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: https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl
- drdebug 6y ago
  Works great, thank you!
- justaj 6y ago
  Don't all terminal emulators have the ability to display something though?
  - j-james 6y ago
    Nope, unless you're thinking of something like `catimg`, which wouldn't really work well for the linked gplot example. `xfce4-terminal` off the top of my head is an example of a terminal emulator that supports neither sixels nor kitty's protocol. https://github.com/posva/catimg https://github.com/posva/catimg https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729204 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729204
- ziotom78 6y ago
  Thanks for having created that package, I am a regular user and I think it's excellent!
hcho3 6y ago
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.
anongraddebt 6y ago
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.
JdeBP 6y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22673768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22673768
dmix 6y ago
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. Likewise I had repeated issues with iTerm breaking or consuming tons of resources for no reason which I had zero interest in debugging. Glad to recommend it to anyone else. ...At least on MacOS. On Linux I was very happy with Termite which fit my keyboard-centric linux style https://github.com/thestinger/termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite
- jwr 6y ago
  I'm a bit curious why people on MacOS don't just use the built-in Terminal.app. It's really good and fast.
  - recuter 6y ago
    It was sort of unloved for a long time which left the opening for something like iTerm to get popular in the first place. I'd honestly would go back but can't give up the iTerm Hotkey Window (global hotkey, semi transparent terminal quickly slides out from the top of the screen).
  - drunner 6y ago
    it doesn't have true colors for one
    - chansiky 6y ago
      This is also why I use kitty instead of terminal.app. I just can't get colors working for vim. Otherwise, its surprisingly fast. Much better than iTerm imo.
j-james 6y ago
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. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Other seemingly more minor (but which will possibly be more widely used eventually) features are different forms of underline, selectable through sub-parameters to SGR 4. I've already put this into my terminal emulator, although that version is not released yet; it exists in LibVTE and several other terminal emulators; and the Windows Terminal people also have a backlog item for it. * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7228 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7228
- MayeulC 6y ago
  I quite like that as well, it works very well in ranger. However, I was in awe at libsixel's support of animated pictures. I'm not sure how that's done, probably just re-drawing still images? That got me thinking: as kitty supports displaying images from shared memory, couldn't it just expose a buffer for the app to draw inside? Going further, it would be an interesting experiment to make the terminal a fully working "wayland compositor", maybe with some extensions to control buffer placement with escape codes. What would it bring? It seems that the most stable API for application development has been the command line interface. Going further, I'd be interested in running a terminal emulator such as kitty as the sole application on a TTY, like a fbcon replacement.
modzu 6y ago
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)
dan15 6y ago
How does it compare to the new Windows Terminal?
- reyqn 6y ago
  It doesn't support windows, so it can't really compare.
dheera 6y ago
> You can install pre-built binaries of kitty if you are on macOS or Linux using the following simple command: > curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin 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?
- scns 6y ago
  Just curl > kitty-install.sh and read it?
  - dheera 6y ago
    I don't want to parse code, I want a list of changes to my system and to be assured of an uninstall method.
- pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
  I’d suggest reporting this upstream, but, well… https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 So instead I’ll suggest avoiding it altogether.
- _frkl 6y ago
  It's packaged in most distributions, so maybe just use those packages? Also, there are binaries on the Github release page: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases , just download and put them into $PATH manually? Given all that, I find it perfectly acceptable to offer a curly install script as an additional option for users who don't think those scripts are as problematic as people often claim on hackernews or reddit (I personally am perfectly ok with them -- I have to trust the author of a piece of software anyway, so why not also trust the installer that comes from the same source/host?).
devenblake 6y ago
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!
- devenblake 6y ago
  Update: I switched back to xterm. There were just some weird drawing issues when using it with `ne` and ssh had real issues.ssh is fixable but... eh... I don't wanna have to put time into configuring a terminal emulator further than configuring colors.
bitwize 6y ago
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.
- anthk 6y ago
  wasn't glamor slow as hell? Which was that speed hack BTW?
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Setting the fastScroll resource to true allows xterm to emulate the behavior of later terminal emulators, which discard screen updates for speed purposes ("speed" being measured by "how long does it take to cat a large file to the terminal in its entirety"). Before this feature, xterm was considered the slowest terminal emulator because it updated the screen with each write, the way real terminals do. But now you can turn on fastScroll and amaze your friends with fast cat times. Glamor was slow as hell. It got better when Keith Packard stopped calling glFlush() after every draw call.
    - anthk 6y ago
      Thanks, it works well.
jpeeler 6y ago
I use and love Kitty. One of my favorite features is the ability to yank text by word anywhere in the terminal and insert (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#shortcut-kitty.Insert-selected-word https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#shortcut-kitty.Ins...). There's also different hints that can be enacted allowing you to narrow your focus to specific items such as paths and URLs: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints.html https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints.html. 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.
- laktak 6y ago
  Try tmux with my extrakto https://github.com/laktak/extrakto https://github.com/laktak/extrakto
  - jpeeler 6y ago
    That is interesting and worth checking out. However, I'd say one of the benefits of using a featureful terminal is the ability to not have to use tmux. Am I understanding this correctly in that you have to use this inside tmux? If so, the demo on the github page is a bit misleading without the default tmux bar at the bottom...
skratlo 6y ago
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
- akvadrako 6y ago
  I agree. I had to argue with the author to convince him it was the right thing to do to fix a consistent crash on wayland because kitty wasn’t using the api right.
- 7MinOfTerror 6y ago
  > As of kitty, just check out it's source repo to get an idea of how messy everything it is I'll save everyone a bunch of clicks and say that it's a project by Kovid Goyal aka the author of Calibre, the open-source eBook library management tool. If you've never used Calibre: It has a horrific UI and basic functions most users would want to do require following lengthy guides. It has no ability to self-update. Goyal has made various excuses for this but it seems to mostly boil down to either he can't be bothered, or he doesn't know how. I can't find the post but at one point he was claiming it was "because of bandwidth costs." Apparently he's unaware of delta updaters, or even content delivery networks. It has 'recipes' for downloading news from a site and wrapping this into an ebook for your reader. The recipes are implemented as part of the core program, not as a plugin. You have to update Calibre as a whole - a several hundred MB download - to get recipe updates. His release engineering is terrible. He regularly implements new features, but his code quality and testing is poor so he's also constantly releasing to fix bugs that could have been hammered out in an alpha or beta or dev release. It's not an exaggeration to say that he was releasing new versions every week or two until 5.0 came out. I'm not aware of any other major open source desktop application with this sort of release engineering. He arbitrarily decided to cease supporting MacOS X versions older than 10.14 with Calibre 5. If you're running an OS older than 2 years old on your Mac, you're screwed. There is little justification for an ebook library management tool needing such a new version of the OS. And again, because he puts all the recipes into the main program, if you're stuck on the older version of Calibre due to having a more-than-two-year-old OS, you're screwed. If you're not aware of Kovid Goyal, well, it would be an understatement to say he's incredibly arrogant and pretty abusive, too: https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934 "Just set your system proxy settings in a way that breaks everything else, because I refuse to implement it properly" is pretty breathtaking. And then there's the time he declared that he wasn't going to migrate to python 2, and he could "maintain python 2 himself": https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9wodtq/calibre_wont_migrate_to_python_3_author_says_i_am/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9wodtq/calibre_wont_... Some of this might be excusable if Goyal wasn't raking in enough money in donations to work on Calibre full time for the last several years (supposedly.)
square_usual 6y ago
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. 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.
- 7MinOfTerror 6y ago
  Kitty comes from the author whose greatest hits include refusing to acknowledge textbook errors in his use of setuid resulting in multiple privilege escalation bugs, declaring he could maintain python 2 himself, and insisting that people must configure commonly used environment variables (proxy settings) in a way that breaks every other program that uses those variables.
  - m463 6y ago
    When I come across stories of these kinds of eccentricities I always remember why my mom always said: "Some people's bad points are also their good points." In this case the kind of stubbornness that creates an opengl terminal emulator.
    - aequitas 6y ago
      There is a story like this in the Netherlands with Radio Kootwijk [0], and old, architectually stunning radio station from colonial times. There is an intricate tilework pattern in the main hall [1] where the architect put 1 tile in wrong, on purpose. The reason was, according to him, that only god could create something perfect. What I get out of this is that it's impossible (or rare) for someone to conceive of an architecture so grand and dearing unless you mentally consider yourself a near god. [0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Kootwijk_(zender) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Kootwijk_(zender) [1] http://www.ronab.nl/radio-kootwijk-binnen-kijken.html http://www.ronab.nl/radio-kootwijk-binnen-kijken.html
tutfbhuf 6y ago
Has someone measured the input latency, compared to xterm and urxvt?
fpereira1 6y ago
I've been using this for a couple of months, I find it pretty fast. I haven't figured out though how to open links by clicking on them. Have been copying and pasting the text into the browser
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
Been using kitty for a while now; here are some interesting details about that: - 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. - 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. - 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. - The hardware acceleration isn't really all that noticeable. - 256-color support is a clear improvement compared to gnome-terminal, which I used before. - 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. - 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. - 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.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  How do you propagate config changes to open terminals?
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    https://github.com/DarkWiiPlayer/darkrc/blob/master/bin/updatecolors?ts=3#L26 https://github.com/DarkWiiPlayer/darkrc/blob/master/bin/upda... Note that the regex is very simple because I have two separate config files for colours in light and dark mode. Having the colours in the main kitty config file would obviously require being more picky about what lines to feed into the pipe.
rswail 6y ago
Can someone tell me what I get (on MacOS) with this that I don't get with iTerm?
- cassianoleal 6y ago
  Less customisation, awkward configuration, about the same performance (from my personal empirical analysis) if you have enabled GPU rendering on iTerm, higher memory footprint (might have improved since I tried it last), no `tmux -CC` integration, awkward tiling... This is obviously my personal opinions and observations, but I tried it for a couple weeks and ran back to iTerm.
kruxigt 6y ago
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.
- kruxigt 6y ago
  Alacritty definitely isn't without flaws of its own though. There are no smooth ways of handling several instance (at least on Mac). You have to bind a shortcut to creating a new Window which will appear as a new icon. And! a new window can take 10 seconds or so to be completely responsive. I don't think I ever experienced a terminal emulator window taking more than a second to open before on any system with any emulator.
sharas- 6y ago
all you need to do is to learn how to program this terminal so that you can program on it.
gonzus 6y ago
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.
catacombs 6y ago
Kitty has been around for years. How is it just now landing on the HN front page?

385 points by Gedxx 6y ago

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. I kinda wish there was a GUI configuration method though. But considering it's a terminal emulator it's not a big deal.

memco 6y ago
I'm also a macOS Kitty user. The config did take a minute to get used to, but the docs are pretty clear and it's really nice to be able to add the config to your dotfiles repo and have it available on all machines. My favorite feature though is the auto layout: it's really nice to be able to quickly switch to different layouts without having to manually move things and also not have to worry if something is going to fit into the space I have. The perf is nice too! One thing I never figured out was how to properly set the terminal when on remote machines: it defaults to xterm-kitty, which led to problems trying to run nano on those servers. The only thing I dislike is the look of the tabs: compared to the OS native tabs it's a bit underwhelming, but they work fine.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  For servers that have older versions of ncurses, you can run this command from kitty to install the xterm-kitty terminfo files on the remote host: kitty +kitten ssh user@host
  - memco 6y ago
    Thanks! Seems to resolve the term issue albeit at the cost of having to remember to use the kitten instead of standard SSH.
    - tomjakubowski 6y ago
      Once the terminfo files are installed, unless the target system has restored from a backup or something, you can just revert to using plain ssh. Or you could lobby your sysadmins to update terminfo past version 20181017 and use 'term kitty' in your config. It's too bad the people involved can't agree on using either "xterm-kitty" (Kitty author's preference) or "kitty" (ncurses maintainer's preference) for the TERM value. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879#issuecomment-433664080 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879#issuecomment-...
      - JdeBP 6y ago
        See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22683277 .
- em500 6y ago
  Solution is in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-when-sshing-into-a-different-computer https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-...
- alecthomas 6y ago
  I just add the following to my kitty.conf and have never had any issues with TERM: term xterm-256color
  - minusf 6y ago
    It's usable but i had a lot of issues. Copy pasty looses newlines, redraw issues in mutt, etc. It is absolutely "forbidden" and unsupported by the kitty author to use any other term than xterm-kitty.
    - em500 6y ago
      The author offers a solution in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-when-sshing-into-a-different-computer https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-... Kitty normally identifies itself as 'xterm-kitty' (in the environment variable TERM). The problem is that most terminal programs don't know that terminal type and use some less featured fallback. Most modern terminal implementations use a workaround it by pretending to be 'xterm-256color', with varying degrees of actual compatibility. (That's also what changing term in kitty.conf does). Kitty's author really wants you to use the traditional solution of telling (programs on) the remote host what your terminal is capable of and how to use the capabilities by installing a new terminfo entry in ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-kitty on the remote side, which is what `kitty +kitten ssh [remotehost]` does. (It needs to be done only once, unless the file gets wiped on the remote end).

haecceity 6y ago

icat and diff programs are nice but I've never thought other terminals needed to print or scroll faster.

reaperducer 6y ago
Then your workflow is different from other people who do need this feature.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  Can you explain? I don't understand it either. I use iTerm2 on a modern mac; does that mean I don't have the performance problems being addressed by kitty and alacritty?
  - hurrrrrrrr 6y ago
    It is useful with some badly written build systems that think they have to write every invocation of gcc to stdout. Like every badly written Makefile out there. Or `cat myapp/log/yesterday.log`. You can work around both but it's clunky. And also it's a thing that's not a must have, just a nice(r) to have.

withaplomb 6y ago

tmux -CC mode support? Stuck on macOS for iterm2 as that’s the only terminal that seems to have it.

petepete 6y ago

I've used Kitty daily for years and it's brilliant. It just does the simple things really well and crazy fast. Can't really find fault.

Koshkin 6y ago
Not that xterm is "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"...
- petepete 6y ago
  True, but every now and then when you accidentally run tree against your entire ~/projects directory, it finishes in a fraction of a second lag-free. Even my old terminal emulator of choice, urxvt, couldn't match that.
  - Uberphallus 6y ago
    Strange, I always found Kitty (or Alacritty) extremely laggy for those use cases, plus firing up the fan of the computer. Also even though constantly running at 60 FPS, input lag is in the order of 300ms.

kissgyorgy 6y ago

Kitty is the only thing I miss from Linux since I'm using WSL 2.

augusto-moura 6y ago
Have you tried running a x11 server on wsl? I heard that it works with a bit of linux-foo, might work for kitty
ComputerGuru 6y ago
I use kitty on WSL via vcxsrv but I had to hack the OpenGL support. X410 should work.

krzyk 6y ago

How does performance compare to st? Has any one tested both?

schmuelio 6y ago
I haven't used a considerable amount of time using st (I think for a total of 2 days on a VM?) I liked st just fine but I found the day-to-day performance of kitty really solid. It feels like kitty takes _slightly_ longer to start up but it's still a tiny amount of time. There's also the different configuration options, kitty has a config file but st (if memory serves) needs to be recompiled for changes. I've found that initially kitty can have trouble rendering fonts with correct spacing but that takes a couple of minutes to tweak to your liking. And I think the colour configurations are a little more complex? I haven't had to change the config for a while though. The GPU acceleration does make stdout much faster if it's unbuffered (in my experience) and on a 144hz monitor it looks so much smoother. Hopefully that's enough of a comparison? Sorry I couldn't give more feedback, as mentioned I've only used st for a short time.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  You can also use kitty -1 to use a single instance of kitty although the startup time is already so small I doubt you could tell the difference without measuring
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > It feels like kitty takes _slightly_ longer to start up but it's still a tiny amount of time. For me the difference was large enough to switch to st. Kitty's startup takes 5-10 times as long and it's very noticable for me. As I use terminals a lot this meant a delay every time I opened an instance. But this is a subjective thing of course. I have all the features I need with st and use a terminal multiplexer for the rest.
JNRowe 6y ago
I use both, but don't really feel like there is a useful comparison. My lightly patched st /feels/ better IME, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same featureset. kitty has its fancier font support and cool kittens which make the comparison very uneven. I limit my kitty use to a single long running instance as my vim terminal, taking advantage of its far better rendering for pretty symbols and inline images via the icat kitten. For everything else I find st/urxvt far more useful, in spite of the occasional rendering errors and font selection problems. Even going so far as to fiddle with sxiv's Xembed support to weakly imitate kitty's icat from time to time.

yewenjie 6y ago

How does this compare with Alacritty?

Barrin92 6y ago
Alacritty has fewer features (by design) i think. Alacritty is more supposed to be used with something like screen or tmux while Kitty has tabs, splits and so on.
- shirakawasuna 6y ago
  My understanding with Alacritty is that functionality like tabs would be up to downstream software to implement. So I create a new project called "UltraAwesomeTerminal" and use Alacritty as a library. Is that accurate? I'm kind of unsure.
  - nixpulvis 6y ago
    Our position is that tabs is the job for your window manager. I, for example, run `i3` which makes implementing tabs in Alacritty a non-issue for me.
    - szemet 6y ago
      I use tabbed for Alacritty, it works in any WM. https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
    - shirakawasuna 6y ago
      Thanks for the reply! That makes sense. And sorry for the late response.
nixpulvis 6y ago
Perhaps run them both and let us know.
gavinray 6y ago
Alacritty + Starship is heaven https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/

Koshkin 6y ago

> Kitty Not gputty? OK, I will call it gpussy, then.

garou 6y ago

I dont like their approach in the issue of "Kitty Only uses Dark colors"[1] 1. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197

kemayo 6y ago
Kovid Goyal is a person with forcefully presented opinions. I've submitted bugs to Calibre before, so I can vouch that his style remains the same.
- garou 6y ago
  Yeah. I've tried the Kitty last year and when my colors showed different I found this Issue already closed and with some strong words/opinions from him. Hard to like it.
  - cosmojg 6y ago
    He's not wrong, though. He's following the spec, and users are asking him to violate it to be compatible with programs which also violate it. If everyone just followed the spec, however, colors would work beautifully for everyone all the time without anyone having to worry about weird edge cases in specific programs. If a program you run in Kitty displays incorrect colors because it's hijacked bolding instead of implementing proper color support, you should absolutely go and make the issue known to the authors of said program as they are the ones who fucked up by violating the spec in the first place. The whole point of standards is to make the relevant technologies more accessible. Developers too often break spec without regard for accessibility, all in the name of cool new features. This is bad, and it makes sense to discourage it by simply enforcing the spec.
    - tangus 6y ago
      The standard says "bold or increased intensity". I see brighter colors on dark background (what everybody does) more in line with it than darker colors on dark background (what Kitty does).

INTPenis 6y ago

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. :) Anyways here are my impressions after 1 month. 1. You have to transfer terminfo to all ssh servers because the kitty term does not exist there. 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) 3. Unlike gnome-terminal (my old default) it actually opens up to fullscreen if you used it in fullscreen mode last. 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. 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. 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.

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flatiron 6y ago
1) kitty +kitten ssh myserver That solves that.
- hoistbypetard 6y ago
  As much as I like kitty, that shortcut is the only reason I've continued to use it for the past 18 months. Needing to manually fix it every time I connect to a new VM would've otherwise killed the appeal for me. `+kitten ssh` solves it nicely.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  FWIW that doesn't copy user capabilities; for that use: infocmp -x xterm-kitty | ssh myserver tic -x -o \~/.terminfo /dev/stdin
  - memco 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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slobiwan 6y ago

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 [http://www.9bis.net/kitty http://www.9bis.net/kitty] which is based on Putty [https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/], both Windows programs.

deleted 6y ago
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linuxdaemon 6y ago

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. 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. 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.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

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.

blinkingled 6y ago
Do you have a dual GPU laptop? Kitty uses more CPU than say Konsole but I can't imagine it using 30w - likely it wakes up the dGPU when it shouldn't. I use it all the time on my ThinkPad with iGPU and haven't noticed any big battery differences from when I was using Konsole.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Yes. I have a Clevo laptop with an nvidia GTX 1070 GPU. I'm using the proprietary drivers and have hybrid graphics disabled in the firmware settings. I monitor the power usage of the GPU at all times. It idles at ~8 W and spikes to 30~40 W every time Kitty is in the foreground. That's comparable to running RetroArch with some shaders. The Intel GPU caused kernel panics during video decoding last time I tried using it so I do not have any power usage data for it.
- vidarh 6y ago
  kitty uses shaders, so I guess that might be it.

wef 6y ago

... and it's wayland-native! 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? ... 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.

unixhero 6y ago

Sigh. There's already a project called Kitty. It has been going for many years. It is the feature enhancing fork [0] [1] of Putty. 0, https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY 1, http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md

Igelau 6y ago
The semantic space of software project names is filling up while simultaneously contracting. It's time to accept that all names going forward are going to have collisions and get on with life
- Karunamon 6y ago
  It's significantly less forgivable when it's another project in the same category of software.
- edoceo 6y ago
  Like that dude who had a go project that bowled over by Google Golang E: found it! https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    To me, that incident was one of the first times I really started thinking "Google really have gone evil". I know, I know... it's "just" a name of a programming language. I don't care: it's the principle of the thing. The name was taken, and the only correct thing for Google to do when he stepped forward, was to change the name. That they chose not to really tarnished their image in my eyes, and still does to this day. It's a shame that the other guy wasn't in a position to / willing to / whatever, sue the pants off of Google at the time.
    - Igelau 6y ago
      Both names are terrible!

Keyframe 6y ago

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.

knubie 6y ago
There was a big update recently that added better split pane support. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog.html#id9 https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog.html#id9
- Keyframe 6y ago
  well, that's it then. No gripes anymore!
Valord 6y ago
I have been running Kitty for just as long but never use any layout and pane features. Serious question - why would one want to do window management in their terminal vs something like tmux or screen?

sischoel 6y ago

Kitty's ability to display is quite fun (although it is definitely not the first terminal editor to do so). 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: https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl

drdebug 6y ago
Works great, thank you!
justaj 6y ago
Don't all terminal emulators have the ability to display something though?
- j-james 6y ago
  Nope, unless you're thinking of something like `catimg`, which wouldn't really work well for the linked gplot example. `xfce4-terminal` off the top of my head is an example of a terminal emulator that supports neither sixels nor kitty's protocol. https://github.com/posva/catimg https://github.com/posva/catimg https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729204 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729204
ziotom78 6y ago
Thanks for having created that package, I am a regular user and I think it's excellent!

hcho3 6y ago

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.

anongraddebt 6y ago

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.

JdeBP 6y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22673768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22673768

dmix 6y ago

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. Likewise I had repeated issues with iTerm breaking or consuming tons of resources for no reason which I had zero interest in debugging. Glad to recommend it to anyone else. ...At least on MacOS. On Linux I was very happy with Termite which fit my keyboard-centric linux style https://github.com/thestinger/termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite

jwr 6y ago
I'm a bit curious why people on MacOS don't just use the built-in Terminal.app. It's really good and fast.
- recuter 6y ago
  It was sort of unloved for a long time which left the opening for something like iTerm to get popular in the first place. I'd honestly would go back but can't give up the iTerm Hotkey Window (global hotkey, semi transparent terminal quickly slides out from the top of the screen).
- drunner 6y ago
  it doesn't have true colors for one
  - chansiky 6y ago
    This is also why I use kitty instead of terminal.app. I just can't get colors working for vim. Otherwise, its surprisingly fast. Much better than iTerm imo.

j-james 6y ago

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. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html

JdeBP 6y ago
Other seemingly more minor (but which will possibly be more widely used eventually) features are different forms of underline, selectable through sub-parameters to SGR 4. I've already put this into my terminal emulator, although that version is not released yet; it exists in LibVTE and several other terminal emulators; and the Windows Terminal people also have a backlog item for it. * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7228 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7228
MayeulC 6y ago
I quite like that as well, it works very well in ranger. However, I was in awe at libsixel's support of animated pictures. I'm not sure how that's done, probably just re-drawing still images? That got me thinking: as kitty supports displaying images from shared memory, couldn't it just expose a buffer for the app to draw inside? Going further, it would be an interesting experiment to make the terminal a fully working "wayland compositor", maybe with some extensions to control buffer placement with escape codes. What would it bring? It seems that the most stable API for application development has been the command line interface. Going further, I'd be interested in running a terminal emulator such as kitty as the sole application on a TTY, like a fbcon replacement.

modzu 6y ago

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)

dan15 6y ago

How does it compare to the new Windows Terminal?

reyqn 6y ago
It doesn't support windows, so it can't really compare.

dheera 6y ago

> You can install pre-built binaries of kitty if you are on macOS or Linux using the following simple command: > curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin 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?

scns 6y ago
Just curl > kitty-install.sh and read it?
- dheera 6y ago
  I don't want to parse code, I want a list of changes to my system and to be assured of an uninstall method.
pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
I’d suggest reporting this upstream, but, well… https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 So instead I’ll suggest avoiding it altogether.
_frkl 6y ago
It's packaged in most distributions, so maybe just use those packages? Also, there are binaries on the Github release page: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases , just download and put them into $PATH manually? Given all that, I find it perfectly acceptable to offer a curly install script as an additional option for users who don't think those scripts are as problematic as people often claim on hackernews or reddit (I personally am perfectly ok with them -- I have to trust the author of a piece of software anyway, so why not also trust the installer that comes from the same source/host?).

devenblake 6y ago

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!

devenblake 6y ago
Update: I switched back to xterm. There were just some weird drawing issues when using it with `ne` and ssh had real issues.ssh is fixable but... eh... I don't wanna have to put time into configuring a terminal emulator further than configuring colors.

bitwize 6y ago

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.

anthk 6y ago
wasn't glamor slow as hell? Which was that speed hack BTW?
- bitwize 6y ago
  Setting the fastScroll resource to true allows xterm to emulate the behavior of later terminal emulators, which discard screen updates for speed purposes ("speed" being measured by "how long does it take to cat a large file to the terminal in its entirety"). Before this feature, xterm was considered the slowest terminal emulator because it updated the screen with each write, the way real terminals do. But now you can turn on fastScroll and amaze your friends with fast cat times. Glamor was slow as hell. It got better when Keith Packard stopped calling glFlush() after every draw call.
  - anthk 6y ago
    Thanks, it works well.

jpeeler 6y ago

I use and love Kitty. One of my favorite features is the ability to yank text by word anywhere in the terminal and insert (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#shortcut-kitty.Insert-selected-word https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#shortcut-kitty.Ins...). There's also different hints that can be enacted allowing you to narrow your focus to specific items such as paths and URLs: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints.html https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints.html. 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.

laktak 6y ago
Try tmux with my extrakto https://github.com/laktak/extrakto https://github.com/laktak/extrakto
- jpeeler 6y ago
  That is interesting and worth checking out. However, I'd say one of the benefits of using a featureful terminal is the ability to not have to use tmux. Am I understanding this correctly in that you have to use this inside tmux? If so, the demo on the github page is a bit misleading without the default tmux bar at the bottom...

skratlo 6y ago

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

akvadrako 6y ago
I agree. I had to argue with the author to convince him it was the right thing to do to fix a consistent crash on wayland because kitty wasn’t using the api right.
7MinOfTerror 6y ago
> As of kitty, just check out it's source repo to get an idea of how messy everything it is I'll save everyone a bunch of clicks and say that it's a project by Kovid Goyal aka the author of Calibre, the open-source eBook library management tool. If you've never used Calibre: It has a horrific UI and basic functions most users would want to do require following lengthy guides. It has no ability to self-update. Goyal has made various excuses for this but it seems to mostly boil down to either he can't be bothered, or he doesn't know how. I can't find the post but at one point he was claiming it was "because of bandwidth costs." Apparently he's unaware of delta updaters, or even content delivery networks. It has 'recipes' for downloading news from a site and wrapping this into an ebook for your reader. The recipes are implemented as part of the core program, not as a plugin. You have to update Calibre as a whole - a several hundred MB download - to get recipe updates. His release engineering is terrible. He regularly implements new features, but his code quality and testing is poor so he's also constantly releasing to fix bugs that could have been hammered out in an alpha or beta or dev release. It's not an exaggeration to say that he was releasing new versions every week or two until 5.0 came out. I'm not aware of any other major open source desktop application with this sort of release engineering. He arbitrarily decided to cease supporting MacOS X versions older than 10.14 with Calibre 5. If you're running an OS older than 2 years old on your Mac, you're screwed. There is little justification for an ebook library management tool needing such a new version of the OS. And again, because he puts all the recipes into the main program, if you're stuck on the older version of Calibre due to having a more-than-two-year-old OS, you're screwed. If you're not aware of Kovid Goyal, well, it would be an understatement to say he's incredibly arrogant and pretty abusive, too: https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934 "Just set your system proxy settings in a way that breaks everything else, because I refuse to implement it properly" is pretty breathtaking. And then there's the time he declared that he wasn't going to migrate to python 2, and he could "maintain python 2 himself": https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9wodtq/calibre_wont_migrate_to_python_3_author_says_i_am/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9wodtq/calibre_wont_... Some of this might be excusable if Goyal wasn't raking in enough money in donations to work on Calibre full time for the last several years (supposedly.)

square_usual 6y ago

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. 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.

7MinOfTerror 6y ago
Kitty comes from the author whose greatest hits include refusing to acknowledge textbook errors in his use of setuid resulting in multiple privilege escalation bugs, declaring he could maintain python 2 himself, and insisting that people must configure commonly used environment variables (proxy settings) in a way that breaks every other program that uses those variables.
- m463 6y ago
  When I come across stories of these kinds of eccentricities I always remember why my mom always said: "Some people's bad points are also their good points." In this case the kind of stubbornness that creates an opengl terminal emulator.
  - aequitas 6y ago
    There is a story like this in the Netherlands with Radio Kootwijk [0], and old, architectually stunning radio station from colonial times. There is an intricate tilework pattern in the main hall [1] where the architect put 1 tile in wrong, on purpose. The reason was, according to him, that only god could create something perfect. What I get out of this is that it's impossible (or rare) for someone to conceive of an architecture so grand and dearing unless you mentally consider yourself a near god. [0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Kootwijk_(zender) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Kootwijk_(zender) [1] http://www.ronab.nl/radio-kootwijk-binnen-kijken.html http://www.ronab.nl/radio-kootwijk-binnen-kijken.html

tutfbhuf 6y ago

Has someone measured the input latency, compared to xterm and urxvt?

fpereira1 6y ago

I've been using this for a couple of months, I find it pretty fast. I haven't figured out though how to open links by clicking on them. Have been copying and pasting the text into the browser

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

Been using kitty for a while now; here are some interesting details about that: - 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. - 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. - 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. - The hardware acceleration isn't really all that noticeable. - 256-color support is a clear improvement compared to gnome-terminal, which I used before. - 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. - 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. - 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.

aidenn0 6y ago
How do you propagate config changes to open terminals?
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  https://github.com/DarkWiiPlayer/darkrc/blob/master/bin/updatecolors?ts=3#L26 https://github.com/DarkWiiPlayer/darkrc/blob/master/bin/upda... Note that the regex is very simple because I have two separate config files for colours in light and dark mode. Having the colours in the main kitty config file would obviously require being more picky about what lines to feed into the pipe.

rswail 6y ago

Can someone tell me what I get (on MacOS) with this that I don't get with iTerm?

cassianoleal 6y ago
Less customisation, awkward configuration, about the same performance (from my personal empirical analysis) if you have enabled GPU rendering on iTerm, higher memory footprint (might have improved since I tried it last), no `tmux -CC` integration, awkward tiling... This is obviously my personal opinions and observations, but I tried it for a couple weeks and ran back to iTerm.

kruxigt 6y ago

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.

kruxigt 6y ago
Alacritty definitely isn't without flaws of its own though. There are no smooth ways of handling several instance (at least on Mac). You have to bind a shortcut to creating a new Window which will appear as a new icon. And! a new window can take 10 seconds or so to be completely responsive. I don't think I ever experienced a terminal emulator window taking more than a second to open before on any system with any emulator.

sharas- 6y ago

all you need to do is to learn how to program this terminal so that you can program on it.

gonzus 6y ago

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.

catacombs 6y ago

Kitty has been around for years. How is it just now landing on the HN front page?