4 ms·

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/
diath 6y ago
Personally when I tried both (I used a dozen of different terminal emulators to test them out and see which one I like the best) it boiled down to the fact that I had some test file for Unicode characters that Kitty (and I believe Sakura?) were the only terminals that could render it properly, Alacritty was second best but it was pretty broken. Other than that feature wise I didn't feel like either of them was missing anything (for my personal use case). Alacritty has a bit faster startup time though which can be noticable.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Which characters? Is this one of the common test files that float around, like the UNSCII one? Or a private one of your own?
  - diath 6y ago
    It was just a bunch of Unicode characters that I picked at that time to test various terminal emulators, I'm not sure what was it specifically since it's been a while (and there's a chance that Alacritty works fine now), but likely some sort of emojis and Asian scripts.
    - JdeBP 6y ago
      It is a shame that you cannot remember, because I do keep my eye out for this sort of thing. If it's a font problem, then it's not that interesting to me. And most of the Unicode problems tend to be either (a) people erroneously assuming that "private use" is the same for everyone, or (b) the usual problem with code points that didn't have defined widths and suchlike in earlier versions of Unicode. But very occasionally there's something worth noting.
dkersten 6y ago
I liked Alacritty well enough, but it doesn't support ligatures. Kitty does, so that's what I use.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I went the same way, but in the long run kitty's startup delay of about half a second or more just felt too sluggish for me. Luckily st can now be patched for font ligature support, and it starts up ten times faster while I don't notice any performance difference in other cases; it seems GPU-based rendering in terminals is a bit overkill in the majority of applications.
  - dkersten 6y ago
    Oh. I haven’t noticed any startup lag personally. I’ll give st a try and compare.
jart 6y ago
There's simply no comparison. I wrote a program that prints mpeg videos to the terminal, and used it to stress test just about every terminal out there. Nothing goes faster and smoother than KiTTY. Alacritty is no exception; in my experience it had glitchy rendering for certain characters and lagged. The only terminals I've seen that come close to KiTTY in terms of textmode graphics performance and overall quality, are probably PuTTY, Gnome Terminal, and Terminal.app. The only bad thing I could say about KiTTY is it glitches for me on occasion when rendering Emacs windows side-by-side. See also https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printvideo.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printvideo.html
- anthk 6y ago
  Meanwhile I'd just use the framebuffer here with tmux, and a parallel tty with my $HOME/bin/fbplayer script: #!/bin/sh clear setterm -cursor off echo -en "\e]P0000000" mplayer -really-quiet -vo fbdev2 -vf scale=:-1 "$@" setterm -cursor on echo -en "\e]P01d2229" clear Add mailx, sacc, bollux, irssi, bitlbee, cmus, fbpdf2 and fim and I won't use X any more. Even mednafen and ScummVM work with export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon Try it.
  - vdm 6y ago
    Do you have a browser? Clipboard? They're the things that keep me using X.
    - anthk 6y ago
      On browser: lynx and links work on HN. Not many sites. will work, but at least with links -g you'll have images in a second tty (I use the first one with tmux). And you'll get far less distractions. Youtube: mplayer on tty2 + youtube-dl/streamlink/mpsyt. Reddit: lynx gopher://gopherddit.com (r/o), tuir (r/w). Clipboard: gpm. Crude, but it's something.
xvilka 6y ago
Alacritty doesn't have ligatures[1] support. I like the project and wish it success, it has a nice, clean code, somewhat minimalistic, and clear goals. But so far it lags behind kitty. [1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50
root_axis 6y ago
It supports tilde tabbing on osx
izacus 6y ago
Alactrittys font rendering was always a bit different than the rest of my DE which causes it to look jarring. Haven't seen this issue with Kitty.

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/

diath 6y ago

Personally when I tried both (I used a dozen of different terminal emulators to test them out and see which one I like the best) it boiled down to the fact that I had some test file for Unicode characters that Kitty (and I believe Sakura?) were the only terminals that could render it properly, Alacritty was second best but it was pretty broken. Other than that feature wise I didn't feel like either of them was missing anything (for my personal use case). Alacritty has a bit faster startup time though which can be noticable.

JdeBP 6y ago
Which characters? Is this one of the common test files that float around, like the UNSCII one? Or a private one of your own?
- diath 6y ago
  It was just a bunch of Unicode characters that I picked at that time to test various terminal emulators, I'm not sure what was it specifically since it's been a while (and there's a chance that Alacritty works fine now), but likely some sort of emojis and Asian scripts.
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    It is a shame that you cannot remember, because I do keep my eye out for this sort of thing. If it's a font problem, then it's not that interesting to me. And most of the Unicode problems tend to be either (a) people erroneously assuming that "private use" is the same for everyone, or (b) the usual problem with code points that didn't have defined widths and suchlike in earlier versions of Unicode. But very occasionally there's something worth noting.

dkersten 6y ago

I liked Alacritty well enough, but it doesn't support ligatures. Kitty does, so that's what I use.

alpaca128 6y ago
I went the same way, but in the long run kitty's startup delay of about half a second or more just felt too sluggish for me. Luckily st can now be patched for font ligature support, and it starts up ten times faster while I don't notice any performance difference in other cases; it seems GPU-based rendering in terminals is a bit overkill in the majority of applications.
- dkersten 6y ago
  Oh. I haven’t noticed any startup lag personally. I’ll give st a try and compare.

jart 6y ago

There's simply no comparison. I wrote a program that prints mpeg videos to the terminal, and used it to stress test just about every terminal out there. Nothing goes faster and smoother than KiTTY. Alacritty is no exception; in my experience it had glitchy rendering for certain characters and lagged. The only terminals I've seen that come close to KiTTY in terms of textmode graphics performance and overall quality, are probably PuTTY, Gnome Terminal, and Terminal.app. The only bad thing I could say about KiTTY is it glitches for me on occasion when rendering Emacs windows side-by-side. See also https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printvideo.html https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printvideo.html

anthk 6y ago
Meanwhile I'd just use the framebuffer here with tmux, and a parallel tty with my $HOME/bin/fbplayer script: #!/bin/sh clear setterm -cursor off echo -en "\e]P0000000" mplayer -really-quiet -vo fbdev2 -vf scale=:-1 "$@" setterm -cursor on echo -en "\e]P01d2229" clear Add mailx, sacc, bollux, irssi, bitlbee, cmus, fbpdf2 and fim and I won't use X any more. Even mednafen and ScummVM work with export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon Try it.
- vdm 6y ago
  Do you have a browser? Clipboard? They're the things that keep me using X.
  - anthk 6y ago
    On browser: lynx and links work on HN. Not many sites. will work, but at least with links -g you'll have images in a second tty (I use the first one with tmux). And you'll get far less distractions. Youtube: mplayer on tty2 + youtube-dl/streamlink/mpsyt. Reddit: lynx gopher://gopherddit.com (r/o), tuir (r/w). Clipboard: gpm. Crude, but it's something.

xvilka 6y ago

Alacritty doesn't have ligatures[1] support. I like the project and wish it success, it has a nice, clean code, somewhat minimalistic, and clear goals. But so far it lags behind kitty. [1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

root_axis 6y ago

It supports tilde tabbing on osx

izacus 6y ago

Alactrittys font rendering was always a bit different than the rest of my DE which causes it to look jarring. Haven't seen this issue with Kitty.