5 ms·

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, a

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
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- k33n 6y ago
  So what are your greatest hits?
  - nix23 6y ago
    He is good in lamenting about other peoples and their free and opensource software.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - valvar 6y ago
      It's amazing how entitled and ungrateful some people are. If you don't like it, don't use it, or fork it, or patch it, or whatever. Just don't spew vitriol at someone developing free things for the benefit of others.
- krimeo 6y ago
  Zed Shaw? I am probably not switching from terminator but now I will keep Kitty in mind and one day give it a shot.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    Wow, it's been a while since I've heard Zed's name in the wild. That aside, the author of Kitty is Kovid Goyal - you may remember him from other such impressive open source tools as Calibre.
- rjzzleep 6y ago
  OK so I saw this when people started jumping on bashing the Calibre author. They posted this[1] link as a reference. Couple of things to note here: 1. I'm pretty certain that when he says he can maintain python 2 he doesn't mean python 2 but rather the python 2 version of calibre. Note that he is not a native English speaker. 2. He never actually said he wouldn't merge python 3 code. Apparently people never read past comment #2 up until comment #4: > Kovid has stated numerous times that any patches which work towards python3 compatibility without hurting python2 functionality or performance would be happily accepted. Oddly enough, no one has ever taken him up on that, though a number of people have insisted it is very important that he himself do that work. 3. There are plenty of people in this planet that actually don't want a UI. I've been happily using rxvt-unicode for ages because of its perl scriptability. Kitty works well and has python scritability. It's way faster at rendering new windows than alacritty and has some other features that rxvt-unicode had and other terminals don't have. There have been plenty tiling WMs spawning left and right with a pretty significant but also niche following. Not everyone wants bloated GUI's. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
  - square_usual 6y ago
    > There are plenty of people in this planet that actually don't want a UI. Yes, but there's plenty of people to do. And, in case you missed it, > By all means, Kitty is amazing if you get into its model [...]
    - Uberphallus 6y ago
      Actually, very few people among those that are willing to try this or that super advanced high performnace terminal care about it having or not UI...
- skrebbel 6y ago
  This is getting ridiculous. Goyal isn't the terrible person you make him out to be, not by a long shot. Somehow recently HN commenters have had a lot of fun cherry-picking every single instance of him not communicating perfectly sharply, in his impressive multi-decade-long career as an open source maintainer and giver of free things. Stop doing this please, you're making the world just a little bit worse.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    As GGP, I feel like I should clarify: I agree with this. No knock against Kitty or Kovid - I used to use Calibre extensively, and he's maintained two beloved open source projects very well. My only point is that Kitty is a very opinionated piece of software, and one should keep that in mind if they want to use it.
    - skrebbel 6y ago
      FWIW I think you made your point very decently.
nix23 6y ago
Give alacritty a try: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty
- square_usual 6y ago
  Alacritty doesn't have ligatures yet, AFAIK, so it breaks my vim use in terminal :(
  - nix23 6y ago
    >so it breaks my vim use in terminal From that Blog: https://dev.to/22mahmoud/my-terminal-became-more-rusty-4g8l https://dev.to/22mahmoud/my-terminal-became-more-rusty-4g8l >>Alacritty doesn't come with ligature support but you can use this fork. Or if you are using Arch you can install it from aur https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty/tree/ligature https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty/tree/ligature I hope that helps
    - square_usual 6y ago
      Hey, thanks. I'll try it out over the weekend.
kanox 6y ago
> 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 I recently switched to kitty precisely because it's portable and can be configured with a dotfile kept in git. Doing the same with putty, iTerm2 or gnome-terminal would require automating the import/export of platform-specific config formats that I'd honestly rather not learn.
- GordonS 6y ago
  You can have your cake and eat it too though - you could have GUI to provide an optional, but convenient, way of editing a config file.
  - _frkl 6y ago
    As a user of a terminal though, personally I would prefer if development time would be spent on terminal features themselves, instead of a convenience feature I'd think unnecessary. I guess this would be a nice project for somebody who really wants that: create a generic gui app to create those config files for a number of applications....
- e12e 6y ago
  > Doing the same with putty, iTerm2 or gnome-terminal would require automating the import/export of platform-specific config formats that I'd honestly rather not learn. Sakura is pretty nice - options can be changed in the gui/menu - config file is stored on disk. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/sakura.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/sakura.1.h...

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
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
k33n 6y ago
So what are your greatest hits?
- nix23 6y ago
  He is good in lamenting about other peoples and their free and opensource software.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - valvar 6y ago
    It's amazing how entitled and ungrateful some people are. If you don't like it, don't use it, or fork it, or patch it, or whatever. Just don't spew vitriol at someone developing free things for the benefit of others.
krimeo 6y ago
Zed Shaw? I am probably not switching from terminator but now I will keep Kitty in mind and one day give it a shot.
- square_usual 6y ago
  Wow, it's been a while since I've heard Zed's name in the wild. That aside, the author of Kitty is Kovid Goyal - you may remember him from other such impressive open source tools as Calibre.
rjzzleep 6y ago
OK so I saw this when people started jumping on bashing the Calibre author. They posted this[1] link as a reference. Couple of things to note here: 1. I'm pretty certain that when he says he can maintain python 2 he doesn't mean python 2 but rather the python 2 version of calibre. Note that he is not a native English speaker. 2. He never actually said he wouldn't merge python 3 code. Apparently people never read past comment #2 up until comment #4: > Kovid has stated numerous times that any patches which work towards python3 compatibility without hurting python2 functionality or performance would be happily accepted. Oddly enough, no one has ever taken him up on that, though a number of people have insisted it is very important that he himself do that work. 3. There are plenty of people in this planet that actually don't want a UI. I've been happily using rxvt-unicode for ages because of its perl scriptability. Kitty works well and has python scritability. It's way faster at rendering new windows than alacritty and has some other features that rxvt-unicode had and other terminals don't have. There have been plenty tiling WMs spawning left and right with a pretty significant but also niche following. Not everyone wants bloated GUI's. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
- square_usual 6y ago
  > There are plenty of people in this planet that actually don't want a UI. Yes, but there's plenty of people to do. And, in case you missed it, > By all means, Kitty is amazing if you get into its model [...]
  - Uberphallus 6y ago
    Actually, very few people among those that are willing to try this or that super advanced high performnace terminal care about it having or not UI...
skrebbel 6y ago
This is getting ridiculous. Goyal isn't the terrible person you make him out to be, not by a long shot. Somehow recently HN commenters have had a lot of fun cherry-picking every single instance of him not communicating perfectly sharply, in his impressive multi-decade-long career as an open source maintainer and giver of free things. Stop doing this please, you're making the world just a little bit worse.
- square_usual 6y ago
  As GGP, I feel like I should clarify: I agree with this. No knock against Kitty or Kovid - I used to use Calibre extensively, and he's maintained two beloved open source projects very well. My only point is that Kitty is a very opinionated piece of software, and one should keep that in mind if they want to use it.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    FWIW I think you made your point very decently.

nix23 6y ago

Give alacritty a try: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

square_usual 6y ago
Alacritty doesn't have ligatures yet, AFAIK, so it breaks my vim use in terminal :(
- nix23 6y ago
  >so it breaks my vim use in terminal From that Blog: https://dev.to/22mahmoud/my-terminal-became-more-rusty-4g8l https://dev.to/22mahmoud/my-terminal-became-more-rusty-4g8l >>Alacritty doesn't come with ligature support but you can use this fork. Or if you are using Arch you can install it from aur https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty/tree/ligature https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty/tree/ligature I hope that helps
  - square_usual 6y ago
    Hey, thanks. I'll try it out over the weekend.

kanox 6y ago

> 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 I recently switched to kitty precisely because it's portable and can be configured with a dotfile kept in git. Doing the same with putty, iTerm2 or gnome-terminal would require automating the import/export of platform-specific config formats that I'd honestly rather not learn.

GordonS 6y ago
You can have your cake and eat it too though - you could have GUI to provide an optional, but convenient, way of editing a config file.
- _frkl 6y ago
  As a user of a terminal though, personally I would prefer if development time would be spent on terminal features themselves, instead of a convenience feature I'd think unnecessary. I guess this would be a nice project for somebody who really wants that: create a generic gui app to create those config files for a number of applications....
e12e 6y ago
> Doing the same with putty, iTerm2 or gnome-terminal would require automating the import/export of platform-specific config formats that I'd honestly rather not learn. Sakura is pretty nice - options can be changed in the gui/menu - config file is stored on disk. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/sakura.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/sakura.1.h...