8 ms·

Recently switched to WezTerm and I'm very happy. Was using kitty before that – loved the set up and simplicity coming from iTerm2. WezTerm is leaps and bounds b

Recently switched to WezTerm and I'm very happy. Was using kitty before that – loved the set up and simplicity coming from iTerm2. WezTerm is leaps and bounds better in terms of what comes out-of-the-box. My terminal config is short enough to sit all in one screen on my editor. After that, the terminal just... gets out of the way and I don't need to think about it. But the straw that broke my back with using kitty was, I'd end up encountering issues or trying to recreate some of iTerm2's features, only to end up time and again on kitty's maintainer's terse and dismissive comments. e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up.

adumer 2y ago
Interestingly enough, the article points out something I had the exact same terse and dismissive experience with kitty - following OS theme.
saurik 2y ago
Yeah: the kitty developer is definitely the sort who believes that he not only knows better than everyone else how to use a terminal, but that everyone else's opinions are fundamentally invalid. That his terminal fails to correctly render such stalwarts as the Linux "make menuconfig" UI and there are no settings to fix it as he doesn't believe in settings is, to me, telling. I then find reading his posts on issue trackers not just insulting, but even "activating" in a way that is really unhealthy, as it results in me feeling a need to "defend" some random bit of terminal usage with just as much vigor, lest he get away with making everyone else sound like THEY are crazy... it really isn't healthy. I can't know for sure--as we don't live in this reality--but I'd like to think that, even if he and I agreed on literally everything there is to do with terminals, that I'd still have the same mindset that I'd rather write my own terminal than ever use his.
- actinium226 2y ago
  I guess this is what people mean when they say a piece of software is "opinionated"?
  - acedTrex 2y ago
    yep, it is his project. Those that like his opinions will like his software. those that do not will look elsewhere. The beauty of open source
    - richie_adler 2y ago
      Nah, I love Calibre but he has lousy opinions that he has to eat over time (he migrated Calibre to Python 3 after all).
  - leblancfg 2y ago
    "opinionated" != "jerk"
    - slightwinder 2y ago
      How is the dev a jerk when they don't want to invest time into patching their app for the quirks of another app? Especially when kitty seems to have tmux-abilities out-of-the-box. I mean, you can like their solution or not, but calling them a jerk for not supporting your way?
  - II2II 2y ago
    It depends upon what you mean by opinionated. There is software that expects users to behave in certain ways and there is software where the developer is quite firm about what they will and will not implement. I would say that calibre and kitty fit into the latter category. These applications offer a lot of features and are very configurable, yet they also don't try to be everything to everyone. While I don't know why Goyal takes the approach he does, I would imagine that a lot of demands are placed on him simply because his software is so powerful (and, in the case of calibre, pretty much the only program in its domain that goes beyond serving basic needs).
- AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
  Remember that this is the guy who said he would personally maintain python 2 because he didn't want to rewrite calibre for python 3 [0]. I try not to knock the guy, given that kitty and calibre in particular are amazing programs, but I still think you've gotta keep that in mind when engaging. FWIW, his conduct on the MobileRead forums where he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers. [0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
  - abhinavk 2y ago
    > he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers. Like the old Linus. He also over-reacted but there was atleast some reason behind that.
  - gouggoug 2y ago
    > he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers. Some programmers (like myself) have little patience for people they consider should know better and are wasting their time. These same programmers are far more charitable to newbies because they know newbies are still learning. > Remember that this is the guy who said he would personally maintain python 2 because he didn't want to rewrite calibre for python 3 [0]. I read his "I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself." as "I am perfectly capable of maintaining [calibre running on] python2 myself", which is completely different. I'm sure some people might also find his answer quite terse and dismissive ("No, it doesn't."), but I read it as a simple statement of facts, using the same tone as the original bug report, which itself is quite terse and imperative "Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3."
    - imoverclocked 2y ago
      > Some programmers (like myself) have little patience for people they consider should know better and are wasting their time. These same programmers are far more charitable to newbies because they know newbies are still learning. Some programmers are life-long learners and know a very different subset of things. It’s important to remember that just because something is obvious to you doesn’t make it right and doesn’t make it obvious to others.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  > he doesn't believe in settings wait... whut? No thanks, I like to customize things
  - aumerle 2y ago
    You shouldn't believe things you read in hacker news comments. saurik is lying, probably because he once requested some feature that the kitty maintainer didnt like and refused with good reasons, which made saurik want to curl up into a ball and cry. To say kitty has no configuration options is the exact opposite of the truth. Proof: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/
    - saurik 2y ago
      I mean I might be "lying"... or I might be confusing him with the Gnome Terminal developers, with respect to that one specific tiny quote about "not liking settings". (FWIW, the setting in question with respect to make menuconfig is "use bold as bright", where the kitty developer is on a vendetta to refuse the historical precedent. He is very adamant that he knows better than most everyone else on this point.) Either way, I have never claimed to have talked to the kitty developer: I -- as well as multiple others on this thread -- are saying we've read how he handles arguing about terminals, and we don't like it. Regardless, I do happen to be curled into a ball, and I do happen to look like I am crying... but it is merely because I am sick: I use xterm and I am very happy with the software and like the author.
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        > where the kitty developer is on a vendetta to refuse the historical precedent I mean, he's not wrong. Everyone else should update their shit to be proper so that he doesn't have to deal with all this legacy nonsense. It's just annoying as hell for people using it right now.
      - aumerle 2y ago
        OK so you are not lying, you are just wrong. Now that you have reduced the scope of your personal attack from he doesn't like settings to he doesn't agree with me about one thing, perhaps you should exercise your new found honesty a bit more and link to the issue where he refused to implement bold as bright and gave his reasons, which are perfectly sensible, namely that having that option means that the developers of terminal programs cannot rely on having a bold font face. Terminals are already limited to using only a single font size, you want to take away the ability to use bold faces as well. And you are trying to sell this as the kitty developer being unreasonable. Shame on you.
throwanem 2y ago
Does WezTerm support an equivalent of iTerm's "hotkey window"? For those unfamiliar, that's a window tied to a show/hide keybinding which when shown floats above all other windows, making a terminal instantly available everywhere - a feature I could live without, but don't care to. I'd love to switch for all of WezTerm's other features, but without that it's simply a nonstarter for me.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  You can set this up very easily with Hammerspoon, and have it work with whichever terminal or app you want.
- ssijak 2y ago
  That is the first thing I configure in iTerm. To have it slide down like Quake terminal, and hide it from the dock
  - organsnyder 2y ago
    Yakuake is usually the first app I install on a fresh KDE system.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  If you use X, you can use tdrop to do this with any window. I have it set up with kitty, pcmanfm, and emacs client.
  - adammarples 2y ago
    X?
    - vladvasiliu 2y ago
      X11, the "old" [0] Linux graphics server. --- [0] "old" because there's a new kid in town: wayland.
      - 2y ago
bee_rider 2y ago
How are start-up times? I mostly like kitty but I’ve noticed that it takes a couple seconds to start up when I put my cpu down to 400Mhz. (Which might seem like an odd thing to do, but xterm handles it fine and, hey, why do we need billions of clock cycles to start up a terminal? That’s ridiculous).
- teamspirit 2y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what reason do you have to do that? Really curious to hear.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    400 is a bit extreme, it is as low as my clock will go. But I often go down to 1200 or 800. I have an OLED screen and mostly use black background terminals, so I can get some pretty decent battery life out of it, especially at night when I dim the screen. Dim/red shift/slow CPU is a nice low-distraction night time mode IMO. Plus it is keeps my palms comfortable even if I accidentally run a computationally intensive code.
- fn-mote 2y ago
  Try using `kitty --single-instance`.
KolenCh 2y ago
I concur, a few problems leading me to migrate from kitty to wezterm are related to tmux, color, and ssh.
- cpuguy83 2y ago
  Somewhat fresh kitty user (a few weeks now). What's your ssh issue? Also saw Wezterm pop up last week and definitely decided I'll give it a go here soon.
  - KolenCh 2y ago
    The first two top results: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-or-functional-keys-like-arrow-keys-don-t-work https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-get-errors-about-the-... https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/3873 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/3873 Basically it is how it presents itself as xterm-kitty and then how to make others recognize that. Installing terminfo on the remote is an option, lying and claim it to be xterm-256color is another (with caveats.) As in other issues with kitty, the author is probably right. But for many people that they have many different kinds of remotes to log into where they don’t have control over, getting around with these issues is tedious. Making kitty works is possible, and I learnt how to deal with these issues one by one, but hearing comments here on HN points me to wezterm and once I migrated I never looked back. For the simple stuffs wezterm gets out of the way. And there’s some interesting advanced stuffs to pick up, such as multiplexing with ssh: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html?h=ssh#ssh-domains https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html?h=ssh#ssh-d...
iaresee 2y ago
I'm kitty + tmux and have been for a while now. What kind of problems were you encountering?
- bibstha 2y ago
  I recently moved from Kitty+Tmux to Tmux only setup. I think the maintainer has implemented most of the features in tmux like split panes, switching, changing layouts etc and is probably why says what he says. For me, I've found Kitty quite configurable enough to have everything except the remote server thing. I used this as my guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/KittyTerminal/comments/z2p2sh/ditching_tmux_for_kitty/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KittyTerminal/comments/z2p2sh/ditch...
  - medstrom 2y ago
    Do you mean Kitty only setup?
    - tennix 2y ago
      I've been a long tmux user, but I've migrated to Kitty only setup. To make my muscle memory feel at home, I configured Kitty with nearly the same keybindings as tmux. Here is my setup https://blog.funcer.xyz/blog/kitty-terminal/ https://blog.funcer.xyz/blog/kitty-terminal/
  - iaresee 2y ago
    I appreciate his efforts, but tmux from my cold, dead hands. kitty is nice and fast, but tmux is in my blood (and on remote servers where kitty isn't).
colordrops 2y ago
As I get older, overly opinionated and dismissive maintainers are perhaps the biggest red flag for avoiding a project now. They often have what looks like the best product out there, but once you get embedded in the product you get stuck in their choices and have nowhere to turn.
bramhaag 2y ago
> e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up. Heh, I switched from Kitty to Wezterm due to the exact same types of comments from the maintainer. It's his project of course, and he's a great programmer, but some humility wouldn't hurt.
- hodapp 2y ago
  My story is about the same as yours. Kovid's arrogance pushed me away.
- Arnavion 2y ago
  >and he's a great programmer The people who had to deal with the Calibre setuid binaries fiasco in 2011 would probably disagree :) ( https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ )
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I think that's far enough ago that we can't really draw any conclusions from that to today. It's like someone deciding my current skill based on how good I was when I left university.
    - godelski 2y ago
      While I mostly agree, it looks like the fair amount of the article is about his attitude. Something that was a bit surprising was the combative tone that Calibre's lead developer Kovid Goyal took in the comments on the bug. Rather than working with Donenfeld to see what the problems were, he dismissed most of the bugs as invalid. Even after Donenfeld tried to further point out the problems, Goyal was rather sarcastic in response: You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I'm shocked. This does not appear to have changed if you look at his responses to issues. I linked the tmux stuff in a different comment (same root). Both skills and personality can chance a lot over a decade and I'm glad you're not quick to jump the gun. We need more people like that. But given brash comments over the past few years, it does not seem like this part has changed. He's been working on kitty for 8 years and has only accepted minor PRs and is dismissive of user issues.
gaws 2y ago
> "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" What problems were you encountering? It's not hard to run tmux (and use all the keybindings with it) in kitty.
ocodo 2y ago
While I see nothing particularly egregious about Kitty's maintainer, other than being a bit of a dick, it's not really the job of a maintainer to be your pal. Except, when I started using WezTerm at the start of this year... omg, this guy is absolutely fantastic. I have read scores of his posts and he's struck the perfect tone in every single one. Love this guy, really, he's awesome.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  For those of us wishing to see, what links are you referring to ?
- deanishe 2y ago
  On the same note, Benny Kjær Nielsen, the developer of MailMate for macOS is absolutely amazing. He spent half a day debugging a rather trivial issue with me and even sent me a custom build. MailMate: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/
_xiaz 2y ago
kitty has the rudest maintainer I know in all of open source software
setopt 2y ago
How is WezTerm compared to iTerm2, since you’ve used both? I’ve tried Kitty a few times, since it has a few features I miss in iTerm2 (e.g. the “i3-gaps” aesthetics if you set the right flags, a plaintext config that is easier to sync, and its graphics and keyboard protocols have a wider ecosystem than iTerm2’s comparable features, and the “layout” feature). But… I generally find that iTerm2 “just works” and requires little fiddling to get all the everyday stuff to work as I want, but I’ve been down many rabbit holes with my Kitty config. For now I’ve therefore stuck with iTerm2, but imagine that a well-configured Kitty might be nicer. Is WezTerm a good middle ground?
ghlezz 2y ago
[dead]

adumer 2y ago

Interestingly enough, the article points out something I had the exact same terse and dismissive experience with kitty - following OS theme.

saurik 2y ago

Yeah: the kitty developer is definitely the sort who believes that he not only knows better than everyone else how to use a terminal, but that everyone else's opinions are fundamentally invalid. That his terminal fails to correctly render such stalwarts as the Linux "make menuconfig" UI and there are no settings to fix it as he doesn't believe in settings is, to me, telling. I then find reading his posts on issue trackers not just insulting, but even "activating" in a way that is really unhealthy, as it results in me feeling a need to "defend" some random bit of terminal usage with just as much vigor, lest he get away with making everyone else sound like THEY are crazy... it really isn't healthy. I can't know for sure--as we don't live in this reality--but I'd like to think that, even if he and I agreed on literally everything there is to do with terminals, that I'd still have the same mindset that I'd rather write my own terminal than ever use his.

actinium226 2y ago
I guess this is what people mean when they say a piece of software is "opinionated"?
- acedTrex 2y ago
  yep, it is his project. Those that like his opinions will like his software. those that do not will look elsewhere. The beauty of open source
  - richie_adler 2y ago
    Nah, I love Calibre but he has lousy opinions that he has to eat over time (he migrated Calibre to Python 3 after all).
- leblancfg 2y ago
  "opinionated" != "jerk"
  - slightwinder 2y ago
    How is the dev a jerk when they don't want to invest time into patching their app for the quirks of another app? Especially when kitty seems to have tmux-abilities out-of-the-box. I mean, you can like their solution or not, but calling them a jerk for not supporting your way?
- II2II 2y ago
  It depends upon what you mean by opinionated. There is software that expects users to behave in certain ways and there is software where the developer is quite firm about what they will and will not implement. I would say that calibre and kitty fit into the latter category. These applications offer a lot of features and are very configurable, yet they also don't try to be everything to everyone. While I don't know why Goyal takes the approach he does, I would imagine that a lot of demands are placed on him simply because his software is so powerful (and, in the case of calibre, pretty much the only program in its domain that goes beyond serving basic needs).
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
Remember that this is the guy who said he would personally maintain python 2 because he didn't want to rewrite calibre for python 3 [0]. I try not to knock the guy, given that kitty and calibre in particular are amazing programs, but I still think you've gotta keep that in mind when engaging. FWIW, his conduct on the MobileRead forums where he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers. [0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
- abhinavk 2y ago
  > he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers. Like the old Linus. He also over-reacted but there was atleast some reason behind that.
- gouggoug 2y ago
  > he answers questions from newbies and enhancement requests are far more polite and charitable. His ire seems to be reserved for fellow programmers. Some programmers (like myself) have little patience for people they consider should know better and are wasting their time. These same programmers are far more charitable to newbies because they know newbies are still learning. > Remember that this is the guy who said he would personally maintain python 2 because he didn't want to rewrite calibre for python 3 [0]. I read his "I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself." as "I am perfectly capable of maintaining [calibre running on] python2 myself", which is completely different. I'm sure some people might also find his answer quite terse and dismissive ("No, it doesn't."), but I read it as a simple statement of facts, using the same tone as the original bug report, which itself is quite terse and imperative "Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3."
  - imoverclocked 2y ago
    > Some programmers (like myself) have little patience for people they consider should know better and are wasting their time. These same programmers are far more charitable to newbies because they know newbies are still learning. Some programmers are life-long learners and know a very different subset of things. It’s important to remember that just because something is obvious to you doesn’t make it right and doesn’t make it obvious to others.
pmarreck 2y ago
> he doesn't believe in settings wait... whut? No thanks, I like to customize things
- aumerle 2y ago
  You shouldn't believe things you read in hacker news comments. saurik is lying, probably because he once requested some feature that the kitty maintainer didnt like and refused with good reasons, which made saurik want to curl up into a ball and cry. To say kitty has no configuration options is the exact opposite of the truth. Proof: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/
  - saurik 2y ago
    I mean I might be "lying"... or I might be confusing him with the Gnome Terminal developers, with respect to that one specific tiny quote about "not liking settings". (FWIW, the setting in question with respect to make menuconfig is "use bold as bright", where the kitty developer is on a vendetta to refuse the historical precedent. He is very adamant that he knows better than most everyone else on this point.) Either way, I have never claimed to have talked to the kitty developer: I -- as well as multiple others on this thread -- are saying we've read how he handles arguing about terminals, and we don't like it. Regardless, I do happen to be curled into a ball, and I do happen to look like I am crying... but it is merely because I am sick: I use xterm and I am very happy with the software and like the author.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      > where the kitty developer is on a vendetta to refuse the historical precedent I mean, he's not wrong. Everyone else should update their shit to be proper so that he doesn't have to deal with all this legacy nonsense. It's just annoying as hell for people using it right now.
    - aumerle 2y ago
      OK so you are not lying, you are just wrong. Now that you have reduced the scope of your personal attack from he doesn't like settings to he doesn't agree with me about one thing, perhaps you should exercise your new found honesty a bit more and link to the issue where he refused to implement bold as bright and gave his reasons, which are perfectly sensible, namely that having that option means that the developers of terminal programs cannot rely on having a bold font face. Terminals are already limited to using only a single font size, you want to take away the ability to use bold faces as well. And you are trying to sell this as the kitty developer being unreasonable. Shame on you.

throwanem 2y ago

Does WezTerm support an equivalent of iTerm's "hotkey window"? For those unfamiliar, that's a window tied to a show/hide keybinding which when shown floats above all other windows, making a terminal instantly available everywhere - a feature I could live without, but don't care to. I'd love to switch for all of WezTerm's other features, but without that it's simply a nonstarter for me.

lambdaba 2y ago
You can set this up very easily with Hammerspoon, and have it work with whichever terminal or app you want.
ssijak 2y ago
That is the first thing I configure in iTerm. To have it slide down like Quake terminal, and hide it from the dock
- organsnyder 2y ago
  Yakuake is usually the first app I install on a fresh KDE system.
lupusreal 2y ago
If you use X, you can use tdrop to do this with any window. I have it set up with kitty, pcmanfm, and emacs client.
- adammarples 2y ago
  X?
  - vladvasiliu 2y ago
    X11, the "old" [0] Linux graphics server. --- [0] "old" because there's a new kid in town: wayland.
    - 2y ago

bee_rider 2y ago

How are start-up times? I mostly like kitty but I’ve noticed that it takes a couple seconds to start up when I put my cpu down to 400Mhz. (Which might seem like an odd thing to do, but xterm handles it fine and, hey, why do we need billions of clock cycles to start up a terminal? That’s ridiculous).

teamspirit 2y ago
Just out of curiosity, what reason do you have to do that? Really curious to hear.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  400 is a bit extreme, it is as low as my clock will go. But I often go down to 1200 or 800. I have an OLED screen and mostly use black background terminals, so I can get some pretty decent battery life out of it, especially at night when I dim the screen. Dim/red shift/slow CPU is a nice low-distraction night time mode IMO. Plus it is keeps my palms comfortable even if I accidentally run a computationally intensive code.
fn-mote 2y ago
Try using `kitty --single-instance`.

KolenCh 2y ago

I concur, a few problems leading me to migrate from kitty to wezterm are related to tmux, color, and ssh.

cpuguy83 2y ago
Somewhat fresh kitty user (a few weeks now). What's your ssh issue? Also saw Wezterm pop up last week and definitely decided I'll give it a go here soon.
- KolenCh 2y ago
  The first two top results: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-get-errors-about-the-terminal-being-unknown-or-opening-the-terminal-failing-or-functional-keys-like-arrow-keys-don-t-work https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-get-errors-about-the-... https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/3873 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/3873 Basically it is how it presents itself as xterm-kitty and then how to make others recognize that. Installing terminfo on the remote is an option, lying and claim it to be xterm-256color is another (with caveats.) As in other issues with kitty, the author is probably right. But for many people that they have many different kinds of remotes to log into where they don’t have control over, getting around with these issues is tedious. Making kitty works is possible, and I learnt how to deal with these issues one by one, but hearing comments here on HN points me to wezterm and once I migrated I never looked back. For the simple stuffs wezterm gets out of the way. And there’s some interesting advanced stuffs to pick up, such as multiplexing with ssh: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html?h=ssh#ssh-domains https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html?h=ssh#ssh-d...

iaresee 2y ago

I'm kitty + tmux and have been for a while now. What kind of problems were you encountering?

bibstha 2y ago
I recently moved from Kitty+Tmux to Tmux only setup. I think the maintainer has implemented most of the features in tmux like split panes, switching, changing layouts etc and is probably why says what he says. For me, I've found Kitty quite configurable enough to have everything except the remote server thing. I used this as my guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/KittyTerminal/comments/z2p2sh/ditching_tmux_for_kitty/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KittyTerminal/comments/z2p2sh/ditch...
- medstrom 2y ago
  Do you mean Kitty only setup?
  - tennix 2y ago
    I've been a long tmux user, but I've migrated to Kitty only setup. To make my muscle memory feel at home, I configured Kitty with nearly the same keybindings as tmux. Here is my setup https://blog.funcer.xyz/blog/kitty-terminal/ https://blog.funcer.xyz/blog/kitty-terminal/
- iaresee 2y ago
  I appreciate his efforts, but tmux from my cold, dead hands. kitty is nice and fast, but tmux is in my blood (and on remote servers where kitty isn't).

colordrops 2y ago

As I get older, overly opinionated and dismissive maintainers are perhaps the biggest red flag for avoiding a project now. They often have what looks like the best product out there, but once you get embedded in the product you get stuck in their choices and have nowhere to turn.

bramhaag 2y ago

> e.g. IIRC his answer to "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" was something like "Don't, tmux is dumb" and closing it. Eventually I gave up. Heh, I switched from Kitty to Wezterm due to the exact same types of comments from the maintainer. It's his project of course, and he's a great programmer, but some humility wouldn't hurt.

hodapp 2y ago
My story is about the same as yours. Kovid's arrogance pushed me away.
Arnavion 2y ago
>and he's a great programmer The people who had to deal with the Calibre setuid binaries fiasco in 2011 would probably disagree :) ( https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ )
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I think that's far enough ago that we can't really draw any conclusions from that to today. It's like someone deciding my current skill based on how good I was when I left university.
  - godelski 2y ago
    While I mostly agree, it looks like the fair amount of the article is about his attitude. Something that was a bit surprising was the combative tone that Calibre's lead developer Kovid Goyal took in the comments on the bug. Rather than working with Donenfeld to see what the problems were, he dismissed most of the bugs as invalid. Even after Donenfeld tried to further point out the problems, Goyal was rather sarcastic in response: You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I'm shocked. This does not appear to have changed if you look at his responses to issues. I linked the tmux stuff in a different comment (same root). Both skills and personality can chance a lot over a decade and I'm glad you're not quick to jump the gun. We need more people like that. But given brash comments over the past few years, it does not seem like this part has changed. He's been working on kitty for 8 years and has only accepted minor PRs and is dismissive of user issues.

gaws 2y ago

> "How do I set up tmux with kitty?" What problems were you encountering? It's not hard to run tmux (and use all the keybindings with it) in kitty.

ocodo 2y ago

While I see nothing particularly egregious about Kitty's maintainer, other than being a bit of a dick, it's not really the job of a maintainer to be your pal. Except, when I started using WezTerm at the start of this year... omg, this guy is absolutely fantastic. I have read scores of his posts and he's struck the perfect tone in every single one. Love this guy, really, he's awesome.

worthless-trash 2y ago
For those of us wishing to see, what links are you referring to ?
deanishe 2y ago
On the same note, Benny Kjær Nielsen, the developer of MailMate for macOS is absolutely amazing. He spent half a day debugging a rather trivial issue with me and even sent me a custom build. MailMate: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/

_xiaz 2y ago

kitty has the rudest maintainer I know in all of open source software

setopt 2y ago

How is WezTerm compared to iTerm2, since you’ve used both? I’ve tried Kitty a few times, since it has a few features I miss in iTerm2 (e.g. the “i3-gaps” aesthetics if you set the right flags, a plaintext config that is easier to sync, and its graphics and keyboard protocols have a wider ecosystem than iTerm2’s comparable features, and the “layout” feature). But… I generally find that iTerm2 “just works” and requires little fiddling to get all the everyday stuff to work as I want, but I’ve been down many rabbit holes with my Kitty config. For now I’ve therefore stuck with iTerm2, but imagine that a well-configured Kitty might be nicer. Is WezTerm a good middle ground?

ghlezz 2y ago

[dead]