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Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator
- rimmontrieu 1y agoCurrently I use ghostty but kitty was my daily driver for years. It works great on old macOs too.
- lxe 1y agoKitty terminal can essentially replace a big part of a linux desktop environment, if you want it to. It's infinitely customizable AND has own opinions at the same time. Also my interactive scrollbar change was recently merged in, so if that was stopping you, you can now replace iTerm on your mac with it :)
- Avshalom 1y ago? what do you think we're doing with our desktop environments?
- snickerdoodle14 1y agorun terminals
- unsungNovelty 1y agoWhat do you think we DON'T DO with our DEs? ;)
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago> Kitty terminal can essentially replace a big part of a linux desktop environment, if you want it to. It's infinitely customizable AND has own opinions at the same time. i'm interested in this idea. can you expand on that? what functionality are you replacing? i don't currently use a DE and i get along pretty well doing most of my work in alacritty and firefox-esr. occasionally i drop into pcmanfm if i need a visual file browser, and i use feh to preview images.
- mmgutz 1y agoI'm on wayland. Kitty can be used as a layershell window. So you can build panels, taskbars, etc if you were so inclined. For example, you want fastfetch or htop as a live desktop background? Kitty can do that.
- calvinmorrison 1y agoI'd like to introduce you to conky
- tetris11 1y agoI'd like you to check in on our dear friend conky. His door is full of newspapers and no one has checked inside the house for a while.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agooh, i already use lemonbar for that. i was hoping for something a little more interesting than info bars :)
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoMy only guess is that this refers to graphical rendering support. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ I both see enormous value mixing text and console, and also worry that TUI will overcomplicate and add even more unnecessary embellishment than it already is trending towards? Semi grump opinion. But it feels weird introducing a new canvas. I do like the idea of graphics being online in a terminal session. Not a captive app experience in a text/graphic UI, but just cli commands that can have some more visual output too.
- wkat4242 1y agoIt's not exactly new and it solves many problems of the older sixel protocol that stems from the age of DEC terminals way before full colour stuff.
- fluidcruft 1y agoFinally a terminal with banner ads support!
- porridgeraisin 1y agoGhostty supports kitty graphics protocol for those interested.
- Blackthorn 1y ago> infinitely customizable Except for loading your own shaders, which they decided they weren't interested in and wouldn't support.
- matheusmoreira 1y agoThat reminds me I once tried to write a terminal emulator for libretro so I could run it on RetroArch with cool shaders. I had completely forgotten about that project... Pretty weird that kitty wouldn't support custom shaders. It already has GPU rendering so why not.
- aidenn0 1y agoWhoever designed the default bindings for kitty clearly has a similar brain to mine. I think I adapted to those keybindings in about an hour, and can't use any other terminal without remapping the keys to match kitty.
- matheusmoreira 1y agoProbably the best terminal emulator in existence today. It really pushes the envelope of what's possible to do with terminals. Also has superb font rendering and is very customizable.
- fishgoesblub 1y agoUnfortunately the dev intentionally refuses to add Bitmap font support for fonts like Terminus.
- SlightlyLeftPad 1y agoIs that because of a performance impact with rendering those possibly? Imm curious what the justification for or against is.
- dfc 1y agoThe developer is up front about the issue: > One of kitty's fundamental features is the ability to display fonts at arbitrary font sizes, which bitmap fonts are not suited for. > So if you like bitmap fonts, kitty is not for you. It's hard to argue with that logic.
- hyperpl 1y agoAlso realized this when trying to get terminus to work. I like the simplicity of foot in wayland and st/alacritty in Xorg. I wish I could find a terminus replacement and I do give it a few hours each year but still haven't had any luck...
- jhbadger 1y agoThe author is an interesting character of strong, often contrarian, opinion. He's also the guy behind the Calibre e-book software, which was largely written in Python 2 long after that was deprecated. He even wanted to maintain Python 2 himself rather than rewrite Calibre, but he eventually realized that wasn't feasible and ported Calibre to Python 3.
- jchook 1y agoIncredible popular software lore here. Calibre and Kitty are two of my favorite pieces of software in the world.
- slightwinder 1y agoThis reads as if he started Calibre when Python 2 was already deprecated..but to be clear, it was started some years before the first release of Python 3, 14 years before the deprecation. And at the time of the beef, many bigger apps were not ported yet (some even till today). The authors' opinion was more an extremer version of something the whole community felt at the time.
- skayvr 1y agoMy progression has been st -> kitty -> ghostty. I wanted to love st, but found too many unpolished corners. Kitty was great, but it felt like the exact opposite of st. Very large and opinionated. ghostty, at least originally, was new and something between st and kitty. With claude code I wonder where the landscape of personalized software will land. st and others may be on to something in this era.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mmgutz 1y ago[foot](https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot) is an excellent st alternative on wayland.
- skayvr 1y agoThanks, this is right down my alley. When I make the switch from X to Wayland, I'll check this out.
- calvinmorrison 1y agoI spent a long time on the gtk vte based terminals (sakura, I wrote my own called svte later), then to st until i had too many patches stacked, then alacritty, but that took a long time to get to because I couldnt figure out how the kerning was different than ST! Now i am on that and it is fine
- zamalek 1y agoI recently switched back to kitty from ghostty. Ghostty was taking > 1s to boot, and I really don't have the time to debug it.
- dmd 1y agoOdd. I’ve never had a new window or tab take more than maybe 20ms.
- 1y ago
- metadat 1y agoIs this different from the KiTTY variant of PuTTY? https://www.9bis.net/kitty/index.html https://www.9bis.net/kitty/index.html I'm just confused now, haha. What's in a name, anyways...
- JdeBP 1y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24645050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24645050 .
- unpopularopp 1y agoI'm probably the extreme minority on HN (0.00001%) but I pretty much never used any CLI applications. Just never really needed them. But recently at work (we use Macs) I had some tasks which need the Terminal.app so I kinda tried to dig in and learn some stuff but whenever I feel I already know something (more or less) there is always some new stuff entering the picture next day. Shell, console, terminal... now a terminal _emulator_ :insert exploding galaxy brain meme:
- JdeBP 1y agoThey are all terminal emulators. You have probably, as one who has never used the command line, never touched an actual terminal.
- fluoridation 1y agoA shell is not a terminal emulator. It's a program that does text I/O (perhaps with a terminal, perhaps not) and implements basic system functionality like executing programs and often scripting.
- MangoToupe 1y agoMost people interact with a shell through a terminal emulator, though. The alternative is something like emacs's eshell. Or an actual "terminal" which hasn't been even available for purchase for many decades.
- fluoridation 1y agoNot always. The shell may be facing a serial interface, or it could be spawned by a program and have no user interface at all.
- MangoToupe 1y agoI probably wouldn't describe either as a human interacting with a shell, but nevertheless point taken.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SaintSeiya 1y agoso many advances in computer graphics to end up rendering text.
- candleknight 1y agokitty is great, but I stopped using it because iTerm's terminal search feature - which I use almost daily - is much more ergonomic. The existing solution in kitty (pipe scrollback buffer to something like less/vim and search with /) is a lot worse IMO which is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me
- siraben 1y agoMy favorite aspect of kitty is the infinite scrollback. My scrollback is 10000 lines long and scrollback buffer itself can store 1 GB worth of history.[0] When you hit a certain shortcut, you can use any pager to search through the scrollback. It's all very fast. [0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/84225d914acd226863e2b8456bd343239c0c4fef/home-manager/.config/nixpkgs/programs.nix#L93 https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/84225d914acd226863e...
- saagarjha 1y agoDon’t most terminals offer this?
- tetris11 1y agoYeah, I thought this was a feature of the shell, not of the terminal
- Valodim 1y agoIt is not
- brokenmachine 1y agotmux FTW
- Twirrim 1y agoIt's pretty common. GNOME's terminal does, as does Kconsole for KDE, and so on. I've got Gnome terminal bumped up to 100,000 lines. There are definitely some that don't, or don't make it configurable, which for me just gives me pretty strong incentive not to use them.
- dartharva 1y agoIs it really that hard to add Windows support for these terminal projects? I understand they are more valued in Linux circles but it's not like nobody on Windows is using the terminal.
- rimmontrieu 1y agoI asked the same question for years but then Windows Terminal appears out of no where and is a real godsend. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
- dartharva 1y agoYes it's the default in W11.
- sigttou 1y agoI've been using alacritty [0] for a while now. Really happy with it. I prefer it over the Windows Terminal, as it feels faster for me. I run a single instance with WSL on the desktop and use tmux for multiplexing. Executing powershell inside tmux isn't an issue. If I need an elevated shell, I use gsudo [1]. [0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty [1] https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo
- CyMonk 1y agoI am really happy with https://wezterm.org/ https://wezterm.org/
- dartharva 1y agohuh, didn't know wezterm was available for Windows. Awesome!
- cursedpikachu 1y agoKovid is sort of an arrogant douchebag https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946
- beanjuiceII 1y agoalmost got through a HN thread without seeing anyone making some kinda of remark, just let it go
- aidenn0 1y agoIf the most recent example is from 2011, maybe it's not true anymore?
- ranger_danger 1y agohttps://0x0.st/KBiB.png https://0x0.st/KBiB.png https://0x0.st/KBiM.png https://0x0.st/KBiM.png https://0x0.st/8SqV.png https://0x0.st/8SqV.png https://0x0.st/KBie.png https://0x0.st/KBie.png https://0x0.st/8Sq4.png https://0x0.st/8Sq4.png
- aidenn0 1y agoAccessing any of those shows stack backtrace of a null-pointer dereference in fhost.c on line 139.
- ranger_danger 1y agoLooks like the site owner just purged everything they host and changed some rules in the last 24 hours, I now get a user agent error trying to re-upload. Wonderful. That stack trace is fake btw, just means 404.
- wpm 1y agoAsk for a refund then
- singhrac 1y ago
- rjdj377dhabsn 1y agoI haven't done extensive tests, but wouldn't a GPU-based terminal emulator cause a laptop to use a lot more power at idle or near idle? Even if the GPU is more efficient than the CPU, I would think it's better to keep the GPU asleep when you're just typing in vim.
- porridgeraisin 1y agoI really like kitty. The customisability is off the charts, especially the remote control feature and the kittens feature. You can do almost anything with a combination of those two. At the same time, it's perfectly usable with opinionates defaults. Run `kitten` and check out the default kittens, there are some gems in there.
- esbranson 1y agoIt's amazing what happens between N_TTY and the terminal to get information from an app to our eyeballs.
- constantcrying 1y agoWhat even is the architecture of this project 1/3 python, 1/3 C and 1/3 Go? What? Why?
- pjmlp 1y agoMaybe it is just me, xterm does the job, and my Enlightenment theme days are long gone. I see no need for the GPU trendy terminals, and same applies to running HLSL shaders on Windows Terminal.
- ZoomZoomZoom 1y agoI switched to kitty after a periodic assessment of my user environment. Turns out, of modern terminal emulators, only Kitty is under a copyleft license. Considering, most of them are pretty capable and competitive, this was enough to switch. What I don't like: - No remote terminal persistence solution in the works + termux/screen incompatibility. - Two modes of font rendering and both are meh. Legacy is uneven and jagged, modern has unbalanced perceived font thickness for dark-on-light and light-on-dark, and the modifications can only make it more unbalanced. Have no complaints besides that. Default keybindings are ok, performance is great, features are plenty, configuration is easy. Font config `kitten` is great.
- hurricanepootis 1y agoKonsole from KDE is under the GPL/LGPL license.