Kitty 0.50

Posted by porridgeraisin 16 hours ago

Comments

Comment by JonnieCache 12 hours ago

The shader support offers a hook to trigger on the bell character, so of course I had to hook this up to a screenshake shader. Get fish to emit a bell on a nonzero command exit, and I have screenshake on failed commands. I expected this to be really annoying but it's actually kindof great:

https://jcd.pub/2026/11/04/screenshake-shaders-for-kitty/

Comment by dyingkneepad 8 hours ago

Completely off-topic, but here we go: look at how your site renders on a very-wide monitor. My browser (Firefox Desktop) is 2560 pixels wide, and 100% of your website content is on the right side of the screen. The column with the text is very "thin", it even needs horizontal scrollbars for the code. I've never seen a website where the left half of the screen is completely empty.

Comment by JonnieCache 7 hours ago

I did it like that on purpose, I like the negative space as frisia was talking about. There are some posts that use more of the screen: https://jcd.pub/2025/04/10/the-gamers-guide-to-line-algorith...

It uses some pretty weird css so hopefully it looks right :) Maybe I'll try and make it so the article column gets wider on very wide viewports but I'm sort of afraid to touch it.

Comment by dyingkneepad 3 hours ago

Sorry, then. I thought this was a bug, so I was "reporting" it. This style is so unusual that it didn't cross my mind someone would want it on purpose. (I have rewritten the previous sentence multiple times to try to make it not sound insulting, I hope it didn't)

Comment by frisia 7 hours ago

With the exception of the code blocks, which I do agree the scrollbars are a bit annoying when there is plenty of vertical space available, I find no issue with the layout of the page on a wider screen. I think this is just a matter of taste, I enjoy the assymetrical negative space, though if I had designed it myself I would probably have the negative space on the right.

Comment by bita_nidir 11 hours ago

Everyone: There is nothing more annoying than this beeping and flashing screen.

JonnieCache: Hold my beer.

(brilliant work btw)

Comment by digdugdirk 12 hours ago

Oooo, that's fun! Excellent write up, thank you for that.

Comment by andersonpico 10 hours ago

calm down, Satan! jk nice write up tho

Comment by anonymous_i 16 hours ago

I recognized him name from Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/about

What a legend.

Comment by pronik 11 hours ago

That's one of the reasons I avoid Kitty. Calibre's backend is powerful, frontend is a boiling oil level of a hot mess. At some point many years ago I tried looking into the code to maybe separate out the parts I was interested in and had to abort on the first source code page.

Apart from that, Kovid avoids providing proper packaging except for self-extracting installers and tends to create new "standards" like Calibre's web server instead of ODPS and in Kitty's case the whole annoying lot of Kitty-derived and Kitty-standardized features every terminal emulator is now supposed to support, which also break existing compatibility -- with the usual "you are holding it wrong" arguments when someone points it out.

In my opinion, Kovid is the original vibecoder -- extremely productive, extremely functional, extremely successful but despite the code (and UX) quality, not because of it (to be fair, I haven't looked into Kitty's code). I'm glad it works for him, I just wish I could use his products without getting aneurysms while wrapping my head around them.

Comment by stryan 9 hours ago

> and in Kitty's case the whole annoying lot of Kitty-derived and Kitty-standardized features every terminal emulator is now supposed to support, which also break existing compatibility -- with the usual "you are holding it wrong" arguments when someone points it out.

What an odd complaint; it's not like he's going about to other projects forcing them to add them. I suspect the reason some of Kitty's standardized features are being independently adopted by other terminal emulators is because they are genuinely useful.

Comment by ghosty141 6 hours ago

> I suspect the reason some of Kitty's standardized features are being independently adopted by other terminal emulators is because they are genuinely useful.

Correct, kitty-keyboard-protocol or kitty-image-protocol are actually useful and thats why Ghostty for example supports them. The alternatives are often worse or only have niche benefits (looking at you sixels)

Comment by bbor 6 hours ago

Yeah nothing made me more confident in my choice of terminal (after trying quite a few) than seeing that "Kitty" graphics protocols are all over the place for SotA TUIs. Love to see it!

But really Kitty is the GOAT because of the customization ethos. Just top-notch.

Comment by bita_nidir 11 hours ago

Wow. It works for him and it works for me. I'm forever grateful for what he's done and I feel this bashing is totally undeserved. Kitty and Calibre are two of my favorite software thingies ever.

Comment by demo4567 9 hours ago

Also a hostile project admin

Comment by DavideNL 7 hours ago

How so?

Comment by krrrh 11 hours ago

Ironically a dozen vibecoders just read this and are kicking off rust clones. A few of them will be end up being pretty good.

Comment by alt-machine-ref 7 hours ago

I am one of them, I just keep adding kitty features to my alacritty fork.

Comment by radlad 11 hours ago

Have to agree - Calibre is amazing and powerful software, and also incredibly obtuse to actually use. This has always been a massive shame.

As for kitty, it seems some of its new standards have unlocked actually useful features, especially in AI's terminal-powered era. But creating new standards and breaking compatibility ought to be avoided unless necessary.

Comment by febed 5 hours ago

> it seems some of its new standards have unlocked actually useful features

Like what?

Comment by radlad 42 minutes ago

Graphics in terminals and better modifier sequences.

Comment by smohare 10 hours ago

The first time I used Calibre it was such a bad experience I thought it was a joke software. Can’t say I’ve consciously used or wanted to use a single kitty feature, either.

The bar is pretty low for some basic UX, and these two projects consistently fall under. But to each their own.

Comment by Alien1Being 15 hours ago

It is the Gimp of book management.

Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.

Works amazingly well.

Looks amazingly bad.

Comment by kar1181 14 hours ago

So true. Main thing is both are still being built and used everyday though.

Comment by asdfsa32 14 hours ago

For the lack of a better functional alternative, not because it is the ideal.

Comment by solyin 2 hours ago

In the case of gim paint, Photoshop is RIGHT THERE, it just costs money, and who's got extra amounts of that lying around?

Comment by indymike 13 hours ago

Sometimes functional is ideal.

Comment by szundi 12 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by osener 14 hours ago

What does that even mean. It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?

He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained. He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.

Comment by Geezus_42 13 hours ago

Your point would make sense if hiring designers wasn't the mainstream.

Comment by tasuki 13 hours ago

Hiring designers isn't the mainstream for people who develop a thing for free in their spare time for everyone to use.

Comment by shimman 3 hours ago

Your point would make even more sense if you realized that not everyone cares about capitalist goals when developing software. Some people want software to work for everyone, not just those with money or means.

Comment by latexr 14 hours ago

> What does that even mean.

Outsider design? It means it’s designed by someone self-taught or not classically trained in the subject. It’s neither insult nor praise, it’s a classification, though often used as a way to express something as being unconventional and interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_music

> It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?

No, because it refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”. It’s two words but a single term.

> He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained.

Your parent comment didn’t claim they were making art. But they are designing the app are are clearly untrained in design. Again, that’s not an insult. How many of us here are self-taught programmers?

> He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.

That doesn’t necessarily follow. If that were the case there would be no designers, everyone would just do their thing. The point of learning design is to understand what works and why and how to apply it. It is perfectly valid for you to have a vision of what you want the thing to do but to need help in presenting it more effectively.

Comment by osener 13 hours ago

Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.

But design is functional. Grows organically by needs of the user. If so many people swear by Calibre, it is well designed for calibre’s use case. It is not only about the aesthetic design trends. They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed. Software like Calibre are a toolbox full of screwdrivers and random things that are not in the same color hue and size and rounded corner treatment. You open the toolbox and immediately know what you need to reach for and where, get the job done and close it.

This appeal to authority is why we end up with everything looking like Juicero of software. Shiny, the same components and pricing plan as everything else. But absolutely soulless and often user hostile.

Comment by Geezus_42 13 hours ago

> Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.

I don't think many of those artists were celebrated during their lifetime, or at least not until the their form became more widely accepted in the mainstream.

Comment by latexr 13 hours ago

> Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.

Which is what I said, in different words. If you understood the term, why did you ask what it meant?

> If so many people swear by Calibre

There’s no true alternative. A lot of people use Calibre despite how it looks, because it does all the things. The world of messing with ebooks outside the vetted stores isn’t that big.

> It is not only about the aesthetic design trends.

I didn’t even so much as hint that. Please don’t straw man.

> They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed.

Again, didn’t even so much as suggested that. I personally dislike Liquid Glass.

> toolbox

Again, there’s nothing wrong with being a toolbox nor have I claimed there is.

> This appeal to authority

There was no appeal to authority. You paid no attention to words in the comment, you fabricated an argument in your head and are fighting that.

Fucking hell, HN is tiring. Stop being so angry all the time, we’re not on opposing teams. Not every comment is a criticism or disagreement for you to rally against.

Calibre is great and I’m happy it exists. I recommend it to people despite not using it myself (I make my own tools). When I used it I found it to be very ugly and at times confusing and found it could benefit from applying some basic well-understood and researched design principles. But that’s all my opinion. You’re welcome to have yours, I don’t care, use whatever you like. Just please don’t mischaracterise my words and don’t come all angry and citing misapplied fallacies at me. I didn’t do that to you and would appreciate the same courtesy. Don’t stoke hate.

Comment by osener 13 hours ago

Sorry I made you feel like this. There are no shortage of “Calibre but well designed” tools, as long as Calibre has existed. I am just tired of hearing Calibre and other open source apps are badly designed as if that is an objective fact. So I ranted against a general sentiment rather than your arguments in particular and I did not mean to put words in your mouth or offend.

However, when can we accept a design stands the test of time and maybe it is in fact well designed? So many objects that are considered well designed today look that way because they got refined over the time and designed through their goals and constraints. Only in retrospect we call those well designed because they were original and not designed by committee. Can you give benefit of the doubt that maybe Gimp’s, Emacs’ and Calibre’s of the world might be in that category?

Comment by tweetle_beetle 11 hours ago

As far as I was aware, there definitely is a shortage of "Calibre, but well designed" tools. What are these tools?

There are lots of things that do bits of what Calibre does (Kavita, Librum, KOReader, Koodo, etc), but nothing comes close to replacing it.

Comment by supersimpleguy 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by piokoch 15 hours ago

Frankly? Who care. Napster had even worst GUI, yet it has become popular as it just did the job people wanted.

Comment by rithdmc 14 hours ago

Did Napster have many competitors at the time?

Comment by 63stack 14 hours ago

Kaazaa, emule, dc++

Comment by riffraff 14 hours ago

Those came one or more years after Napster, when it was already wildly popular because it was the only tool that did that job.

Like calibre, I guess :)

Comment by Lalabadie 11 hours ago

The Kazaa people then used the same base to create Skype (which was "true" P2P for a long time). I'd say they've done pretty good.

Obligatory: I miss Rdio. That was them too.

Comment by latexr 13 hours ago

> Frankly? Who care.

Lots of people. It’s great that you don’t, really, but Calibre is very ugly¹ and I have no doubt that limits its adoption. Subconsciously, people associate ugly apps with unpolished or unfinished apps.

I don’t use Calibre (I rely instead on command-line and bespoke tools) but I do recommend it to less technical people and I always make it a point of saying “it’s very ugly but it does everything and does it correctly, it’s the gold standard for what you want to do” because I’m pretty sure if I didn’t add that disclaimer the people I recommend it to would think they downloaded the wrong thing or abandon it as soon they opened it.

¹ That’s just personal opinion, we don’t need to have a debate about that. If you find Calibre beautiful, more power to you.

Comment by fn-mote 13 hours ago

“I manage my Kindle reading list with home-made command line tools” is a very niche situation.

I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.

Comment by latexr 10 hours ago

> “I manage my Kindle reading list with home-made command line tools” is a very niche situation.

I don’t use a Kindle (it’s a Kobo, those are very hackable) and don’t use my tools to manage the reading list, I prefer to do that on device. But sure, I’m not claiming it’s for everyone, there’s a reason I recommend Calibre to other people. My needs are fairly minor, I don’t even use any of the popular alternative interfaces like KOReader.

> I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.

Not that much effort, and the tools have evolved as my habits did. I’ll give you one simple example of such a tool: I can select an EPUB and press a keyboard shortcut which actions it in Alfred to first convert it to to a Kobo EPUB with kepubify and then upload to Dropbox with rclone. I can then download it from the Kobo manually.

I had another which would take the URL of the frontmost browser tab, download and convert it to EPUB with pandoc, then it’d reuse the same kepubify and rclone steps. That one doesn’t work that well nowadays, with all the websites getting harder to access programatically due to all the LLM scraping.

Neither of those needs a lot of code, and I’m still relying on other tools for the heavy lifting. It’s just that for my specific personal needs, this is faster and more convenient than using Calibre.

Comment by pwdisswordfishq 12 hours ago

I also recognized his name from Calibre: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

Legend indeed.

Comment by monk_grilla 52 minutes ago

Thanks for the fun read.

My takeaways are to redouble my efforts to vet software I rely on, and to appreciate my distros more. It looks like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and possibly many others had quietly spotted and resolved the issue in their distributions even before this bug report.

Comment by jbvlkt 4 hours ago

Even from this bugreport it looks like he learned his lesson. It is 15 years old so it is irrelevant now. It would be long forgotten if it was not archived on the internet.

Comment by pwdisswordfishq 4 hours ago

I don't know, does it? And has he? Based on other comments in this thread, it seems he is as arrogant as ever.

Comment by fullstop 10 hours ago

I hope that he's learned from his mistakes: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027/

Comment by vconnor 16 hours ago

When I first used Calibre I thought it was a disorganised mess trying to cram too many features in one app.

Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.

I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.

Comment by sgarland 12 hours ago

It’s the archetypal Windows 2000-era power user tool. A million menus, every option you can imagine, and once you learn it, you are god.

Comment by tejohnso 12 hours ago

At least there are menus, I guess. Some power user tools (eg: vim) don't give much in the way of discoverability. You either internalize a significant amount of knowledge and behaviour, or you hate it and move on.

Comment by sgarland 11 hours ago

I like and appreciate both, though I grew up as a Windows power user, and hated vi/vim for many years when I got into *nix. It wasn’t until I saw my boss teleport a block of code elsewhere in a file with a few keystrokes that I decided I needed to learn it.

IMO, Foobar2000 [0] was/is the zenith of bespoke GUI programs from that era. The UI is clean, the menus make sense, it’s infinitely configurable but the defaults are fine, it supports plugins…

0: https://www.foobar2000.org/

Comment by trvz 16 hours ago

It's tastelessly designed.

Comment by mattkevan 15 hours ago

It’s like UI outsider art. The Shaggs [1] of interface design. Can’t decide whether it’s hideous or wonderful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

Comment by bardan 15 hours ago

> It’s like UI outsider art.

Presenting... MultiPSK!

https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MPSK-Fig1...

Comment by brabel 13 hours ago

I like it. I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs, thus making the full range of options much harder to get at a glance. Like breaking up your giant function into hundreds of tiny functions. Some people prefer to just see everything at once and I think it’s a valid way to do it.

Comment by latexr 9 hours ago

> I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs

A designer might indeed add more space but not necessarily hide stuff. Design works within constraints, and if the constraint is everything should be visible, then it needs to work like that.

That interface would benefit from more space in areas. Note for example how the descenders of letters (look for “g” or “y”) bleed into the bottom shadow (the “side”) of the buttons. It’s definitely tight. It gets worse with the bold areas. On the top right you seem to have buttons, labels, and a text field, all using the exact same font at the exact same size, all in bold and with no spacing between them. It makes it harder to focus on information, and everything is so close together that you’ll either have misclicks or be slower as you put the cursor in just the right place.

Sure, have that interface for the hardcore users, including those who are going to use the keyboard to interact with every part of that, but it’s not a failing to add more space, and menus aren’t always wrong.

People love making fun of designers, but it’s the toupée fallacy, you notice it when it’s bad. There’s a reason “good design is invisible” is a maxim. Like on every field, there are good designers and bad designers.

Comment by mattkevan 15 hours ago

Wow, that’s incredible. Reminds me of this

https://arngren.net/

Comment by jodrellblank 12 hours ago

“hate scrolling”, he mumbled

- https://www.aplwiki.com/wiki/Whitney_C

Comment by trvz 9 hours ago

Slightly disappointing: he had to put 264 lines of code across 5 files.

I, right now in 2026 and at least one decade later, get at most 59 lines of code at once in my primary editor (Panic's Nova) on a 27" monitor.

That is almost the same ratio.

Comment by jodrellblank 6 hours ago

I don't know if you know the reference, but his screenful of code looked like this: https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/iojATW.htm

(with a post explaining it here: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... )

It's stylistically denser than a typical 59 lines of code, then macro-densified and 'golfed' further.

Comment by brettermeier 15 hours ago

What a band! Thanks for the input.

Comment by kbelder 1 hour ago

I've never used it, but I just went and looked at a bunch of screenshots. It looks great to me. Kind of refreshing, actually, compared to more modern UIs.

Comment by zaphirplane 15 hours ago

Easy to tear down people and ideas, hard to build.

Put forward your vision

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by shaky-carrousel 15 hours ago

Tools aren't meant to be licked.

Comment by abhinavk 14 hours ago

Same with darktable.

Comment by Citizen_Lame 11 hours ago

"I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS."

I love Calibre, but isn't this every FOSS project.

Comment by Onavo 15 hours ago

I don't see why people are complaining about the UI. The calibre codebase is just Python and you can vibe code/customize a nicer UI for it in minutes. It's not like the core changes much. Their metadata resolution and Epub handling and (formerly DRM cracking) are best in class.

Comment by lowdude 15 hours ago

Vibe-coded or not, I prefer staying close to upstream unless I have very good reasons not to, and I would not want to have to half-heartedly maintain a UI fork of this. I would still be quite excited about an official visual overhaul, though

Comment by latexr 14 hours ago

Can we please stop with the suggesting vibe coding for everything? It’s not an interesting response: it doesn’t advance the discussion and no one learns anything. The goal of this website is (ostensibly) intellectual curiosity, and suggesting AI as a solution to every problem is basically a thought-terminating cliché.

Comment by Geezus_42 13 hours ago

I agree, but I think the sentiment is "it's opensource, if you don't like it, change it." Saying "just vibe-code it" is just a reaction to the response people would have given to the first statement in past times, which was to complain about the barrier to entry.

Comment by tehnub 12 hours ago

Would you be mad at somebody for suggesting “Cmd+=“ in response to a complaint about a website font being too small? It’s becoming nearly that easy to fix.

Comment by latexr 11 hours ago

I’m not mad and I would appreciate if we stopped assuming combativeness from the start. That too is detrimental to discussion and intellectual curiosity, and there’s too much of it on HN. I was polite and courteous while making a comment asking for a change in behaviour. Not every disagreement needs to be a fight.

Moving on, that example is different because not only is that solution specific to the problem and teaches you something, it’s also not as pervasive. Suggesting a keyboard shortcut to change text size is like teaching you how to hammer a nail, while telling you to vibe code is like telling you to hire a carpenter. Sure, you can hire a carpenter for your problem, but everyone already knows that is an option and it’s too general. It’s not a solution to the problem, it’s a suggestion of an approach and doesn’t even have a helpful guiding direction. Again: not interesting, doesn’t advance the discussion, and no one learns anything.

Comment by Chris2048 9 hours ago

> but everyone already knows that is an option and it’s too general

There are cases where it's not only an obvious option, but also the only viable one e.g. suggesting to someone they should hire a lawyer: the advice there isn't just that they have this option, but that this is the only viable option, and that otherwise taking legal advise from a forum is dangerous; IANAL-YANAL-GAL!

Comment by jack_pp 13 hours ago

programmers are overwhelmingly the type of people to solve problems whenever someone complains about something.

I don't see you berating people for complaining, after all if the purpose of this website is intellectual curiosity then comments complaining aren't in line with the purpose right?

Comment by latexr 13 hours ago

> programmers are overwhelmingly the type of people to solve problems, whenever someone complains about something.

No one complained about anything, read the parent comment to the comment I replied to. The comment I replied to just suggested vibe coding out of nowhere.

> berating people

Come on, let’s please not be ridiculous. My comment was as polite as can be while presenting a disagreeing opinion. You don’t need to fake outrage, there’s enough of that in the world already and it’s a major reason why everything is turning to shit.

> after all if the purpose of this website is intellectual curiosity then comments complaining aren't in line with the purpose right?

Oof, HN is so tiring. More and more it proves right everyone who calls this “the orange site”. Look, you’re probably not a dumb person, there’s no need to play one and make arguments in bad faith. This is not hard to understand:

If there is something detrimental which you perceive as being done in excess, you should call it out and ask the person to stop, even if you have to go outside the norms a bit, for the greater good of the community. If you are, for example, in a renaissance fair and a couple of guys are being disruptive, it’s absolutely fine to break character to get them to stop; you don’t have to do it while pretending to be a medieval peasant, and it’s idiotic to suggest that would have to be the case.

It’s supremely stupid and frankly embarrassing for this community that I have to point this out as if we’re children. Don’t be Mr Gotcha, he’s not smart and no one likes him.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Comment by jack_pp 11 hours ago

> If there is something detrimental which you perceive as being done in excess, you should call it out and ask the person to stop

that's exactly what i'm doing. there's so many people on here complaining about LLMs in general, I perceived your comment in that same class and thought that it too wasn't adding anything to the discussion. The suggestion to use LLMs is, I think, useful. People might not have thought of it, might not know what the underlying code of calibre is and how easy it would be to modify with an LLM.

I view suggestions, even if rote or obvious, more useful than negative comments like yours.

Comment by Personability 10 hours ago

Suggestions can go either way. "Use an LLM." and "Don't use an LLM." are in the same class of comment. It's quite biased to treat one as a negative comment and the other as a suggestion.

Comment by jack_pp 9 hours ago

he didn't suggest to not use an LLM he suggested to not even suggest to use an LLM because it's "boring" .

Comment by Chris2048 3 hours ago

> My comment was as polite as can be while presenting a disagreeing opinion

The same could be said of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50364936

which you interpreted as combative on the basis that it implies you are 'mad' about something. I wouldn't interpret their phrasing as such.

In this case, a poster who sees your own post as hostile ("berating people"), you describe it as "fake outrage"', which seems to imply their perception is a dishonest one. Their are other impolite and combative elements there too, e.g. "you’re probably not a dumb person", "This is not hard to understand".

The point is, this response is not de-escalating, but the opposite.

Comment by dagi3d 14 hours ago

I really love Kitty, it took me only about 5 minutes to migrate from Ghostty. just wish the used this icon as default: https://github.com/DinkDonk/kitty-icon

Comment by HIP_HOP 14 hours ago

I'm curious, why did you move if there is also now the new Ghost TTI with 0.4? What do you benefit from this?

Comment by jemmyw 13 hours ago

Not OP either but I moved back to kitty after giving ghostty a try. Kitty is pretty mature and it has tons of features. I don't use them all by any means, but enough that I missed them. It has all those features yet it feels so barebones: kitty is a delight.

Comment by kkukshtel 7 hours ago

What features?

Comment by mcbuilder 6 hours ago

I just wanna say, it's okay to prefer different terminals, like there were so many back in the day. people's dev flows become hyper specific, depending on what tools, editors, features they need... I used to use `st` back in the day, but also `urxvt` and the classic `xterm`, or `guake` for adventurous. One of my absolute favs is https://github.com/uobikiemukot/yaft which was fun to rock on classic Thinkpad T62p laptops without any X11.

Comment by ossusermivami 3 hours ago

maybe compare both documentation and make urself an idea? it's all there for the taking

Comment by JaszHere 13 hours ago

Also not OP but Ghostty to my knowledge doesn't support predefined layouts, so that was my reason. I tried zellij, which is awesome, but Kitty turned out to be much easier to set up and ultimately use.

Comment by jorams 11 hours ago

Nothing against Ghostty, and in particular I really like the idea of libghostty, but a pretty significant part of its release notes is about how it's becoming more compatible with Kitty.

If you don't care about native UI widgets (I and many others only use the terminal part of the UI, so I don't) I don't really see a reason to use Ghostty over Kitty.

Comment by jbvlkt 5 hours ago

+1 I switched the other way because kitty gnome integration is lacking. But I like both terminals more than gnome-terminal and ptyxis.

Comment by lkt 12 hours ago

I’m probably going to move away from Ghostty because it crashes too much on Linux

Comment by ssernikk 14 hours ago

Not OP, but I've moved back to kitty because of ghostty horrendous startup time on linux

Comment by kar1181 14 hours ago

That's a one time cost though isn't it? It's a tradeoff, but once it is booted it's blazing though.

Comment by przmk 14 hours ago

When I use the terminal, I spawn and kill a lot of instances for quick tasks. Having a longer startup times is definitely noticeable.

Comment by idoubtit 11 hours ago

My login session starts a background ghostty instance, then each new window is almost instant when I press my i3 shortcut.

This process is documented with systemd, but it's not a requirement, a plain xsessionrc could work similarly: https://ghostty.org/docs/linux/systemd

Comment by tasuki 11 hours ago

> I spawn and kill a lot of instances for quick tasks.

Why? Do you open a new browser window when you want to visit a website?

Comment by xigoi 10 hours ago

I do whenever I want two websites displayed next to each other or when I want to have them in separate workspaces, which is pretty often.

Comment by porridgeraisin 8 hours ago

Yes actually. Ctrl+Alt+b opens a new browser window quickly and I go somewhere. I have it faster in muscle memory than switching to browser and ctrl+t and then opening whatever.

Same with terminal. My terminals (xfce4-terminal or kitty -1) both open so instantly that I can ctrl+alt+t and even while typing at high speeds, the next character is entered into the terminal.

I can type the below sequence of keys at high speed (realistic example that OCRs clipboard image):

  ctrl+alt+t vpng | ocr | ctxt alt+tab

without risking the startup time swallowing my `vp` keys

And yes, I disable animations for any kind of window switching mechanism including alt-tab/worksapce switch

At any rate, I believe ghostty has the same single instance mode equivalent.

Comment by mkingston 12 hours ago

In case you're not aware, there exists:

    ghostty +new-window

Comment by sgarland 12 hours ago

tmux?

Comment by Zambyte 13 hours ago

I figured that was an issue with the appimage for me. Did you install it a different way that you ran into that issue?

Comment by cptmurphy 12 hours ago

also slow startup times, archlinux, official repo package

Comment by ulfbert_inc 13 hours ago

I'd say 100-200 ms is not horrendous but it can be much better without giving up on libghostty-vt :) check out Monstar.

Now, Monstar has a bizarre issue (at least in my setup) where it displays blank instead of capital A when used with Fixedsys Excelsior, for some reason. But hey it starts in under 10ms.

edit:typo

Comment by tasuki 12 hours ago

When reading your comment I thought "how silly". Then I looked at my kitty icon and yup, this is the one I'm using. Heh.

Comment by ssernikk 14 hours ago

I use this icon too! Only thing I customize after installing kitty.

Comment by petepete 16 hours ago

I love Kitty. I've used it since discovering it in about 2019 and it strikes the right balance of things.

It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.

I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.

Comment by vidarh 15 hours ago

When I used Kitty, I hacked in a shader that'd render a crude glow around the letters so that I could use more translucent backgrounds and still have readable text. I have no idea where that code is - I haven't used Kitty for years. But that's the kind of thing that'd be great to do with the shader support.

Comment by tasuki 12 hours ago

I don't understand translucent backgrounds. Can you explain to me why one'd want a translucent bg?

Comment by vidarh 9 hours ago

I don't like staring on a monochrome flat background all day. If I can make it prettier without a sacrifice of functionality, I will.

Comment by Personability 10 hours ago

Aesthetics, likely.

Also makes it easier to multitask, I assume.

Comment by wensheng 5 hours ago

Using kitty's own benchmark tool, compared against Ghostty and Vivido[0]

It is slower than the other two.

`/Applications/kitty.app/Contents/MacOS/kitten __benchmark__`

Kitty v0.50:

  Only ASCII chars                     : 4.6s       @ 217.6   MB/s
  Unicode chars                        : 4.13s      @ 217.8   MB/s
  Unique multi-codepoint Unicode cells : 15.93s     @ 54.9    MB/s
  CSI codes with few chars             : 4.3s       @ 116.4   MB/s
  Long escape codes                    : 6.67s      @ 588.2   MB/s
  Images                               : 4.88s      @ 547.0   MB/s

Ghostty v1.4.0

  Only ASCII chars                     : 1.73s      @ 576.8   MB/s
  Unicode chars                        : 1.63s      @ 551.6   MB/s
  Unique multi-codepoint Unicode cells : 7.25s      @ 120.7   MB/s
  CSI codes with few chars             : 2.53s      @ 197.6   MB/s
  Long escape codes                    : 6.91s      @ 567.1   MB/s
  Images                               : 4.88s      @ 547.1   MB/s

Vivido v0.5.6

  Only ASCII chars                     : 1.68s      @ 593.9   MB/s
  Unicode chars                        : 1.53s      @ 587.4   MB/s
  Unique multi-codepoint Unicode cells : 2.85s      @ 307.5   MB/s
  CSI codes with few chars             : 2.37s      @ 211.1   MB/s
  Long escape codes                    : 6.67s      @ 587.6   MB/s
  Images                               : 4.6s       @ 579.4   MB/s

Tested on M4 MacMini.

[0] https://github.com/vivido-dev/vivido

Comment by ivolimmen 14 hours ago

I use multiple terminals. I like Ghostty and Kitty. I the past I tried multiple others like Guake, Allacritty, xterm, Gnome Terminal, ITerm (when I was forced to use a Mac), Windows Terminal (I am now forced to work on Windows). And of all terminals I still prefer Kitty. There is one feature Kitty has that no other has (or not yet) and that is the 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.

Comment by nomilk 14 hours ago

> 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.

When do you use this? (guessing, when you run something that crashes the terminal?)

Possibly related: I use ctrl+shift+h (and somehow configured it to use neovim), which is a nice way to navigate the terminal history - useful when pilfering through thousands of lines of local server logs

Comment by ivolimmen 13 hours ago

When running a script in the terminal but it fails and it's a huge output and the script was a hack and it only outputs to standard out than a 'ctrl + shift + g' opens the last output of a command in less so I can analyze it's content.

Comment by jpeeler 13 hours ago

I've been a Kitty user for many years, but I bet that Superlogical's Rex is going to take over the world. Currently there is no Linux client available, but I'm sure it'll come later just like how Ghostty was developed macOS first.

This feature seems like interesting timing in light of the above: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#restore-after-log...

Comment by adamcstephens 12 hours ago

You think a propriety, not open source, terminal is going to take over Linux desktops? I’m a bit skeptical myself.

Comment by msdz 12 hours ago

> This feature

> https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#restore-after-log...

Whoa, this is great news!! For years, it has been Mr. Goyal’s standpoint, and quite understandably so, to not offer this natively due to implementation effort [0]. I just put up with that (yes, technically, you could save-and-restore window and terminal session states, but that doesn’t help in case of an unexpected quitting/crash event), since the man is already undervalued for all of his incredible work – I urge any user of either Kitty or Calibre to check out [1]!

Same as for you, Kitty has effectively been the only terminal I use for years now, chiefly due to `edit-in-kitty` when ssh’d onto another machine, as well as the image protocol for a full file explorer experience, e.g. Yazi [2]. I’m also in the Rex beta, but until they add that, or an improved version of the protocol (as apparently streaming of too much image data is holding their protocol/performance back at the moment) I unfortunately can’t see myself switching, even though in principle I very much agree with this sentiment:

> I bet that Superlogical's Rex is going to take over the world.

[0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1197#issuecomment...

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/support/

[2] https://yazi-rs.github.io/

Comment by Systemerror7A69 16 hours ago

Oh wow, I did not expect not only that many interesting changes, but also that many which seem actually specifically useful to me - very cool to read!

I love kitty, have used it for a long while now and pretty happy, except for that one thing about ssh xterm - but even that is mostly minor.

Really cool to see such active development of an already perfectly capable and working software.

Comment by remedan 14 hours ago

Putting the following in my ~/.ssh/config fixed all ssh-related issues I had with kitty.

  Host *
    SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"

Comment by Systemerror7A69 8 hours ago

Yes! That was it, exactly. Thank you, I wasn't able to check my home computer at the time of writing my last comment.

Comment by xnickb 15 hours ago

I've had so many issues with SSH that I ended up ghosttying kitty.

Comment by cybrox 13 hours ago

Fixed with a single alias or a single ssh config entry.

Comment by xnickb 12 hours ago

If you mean the `alias ssh="kitty +kitten ssh"` then no, it's not fixed at all.

For example pikvm exists with read-only mounted filesystem. Having to dive into the details to figure out that the issue is kitty trying to write a file to make some obscure terminal features work doesn't strike me as good design.

`alias ssh="TERM=xterm-256color ssh"` fixes it but isn't mentioned in the docs.

Comment by wzdd 12 hours ago

It’s actually fixed, for everything, with a single kitty config line which tells it to use xterm-256color as the terminal type.

I respect the man’s ideological correctness, but it’s not 1982 anymore and nobody is going to add more terminal types.

Comment by Geezus_42 13 hours ago

Ghostty made that obvious in the documentation for me. I haven't looked at the kitty docs, so Idk if they do as well.

Comment by JaszHere 13 hours ago

Doesn't `kitten ssh` solve the problem?

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/

Comment by Geezus_42 13 hours ago

Doesn't sound like it would work if connecting to a locked down server. However, the problem OP described is easily solved, for ghostty and kitty, by a single line in your local ssh config.

Comment by birdsongs 15 hours ago

I have the same SSH qualms. I still use it because there's not much better for what I need.

Comment by Systemerror7A69 15 hours ago

I believe I got rid of most of the issues with some .ssh setting which simply uses the normal xterm I believe. I can't check right at this moment, but apparently, simply using xterm and not the xterm-xkitty or what it's called does not actually make much problems when ssh-ing into a machine - not in my case at least.

It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.

Comment by cybrox 13 hours ago

I currently just use this in my .zshrc:

alias ssh="kitty +kitten ssh"

sshpass() { TERM=xterm-256color command sshpass "$@"; }

Could also alias sshpass differently but I mostly use that for embedded devices where I just want a simple shell anyways.

The alternative you mean is in ~/.ssh/config:

Host *

    SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"

Comment by ferd 13 hours ago

For terminal/cli freaks, I've just cooked a tool to view all kind of documents right on your kitty terminal

  https://github.com/dobladez/clview

I needed it. Feedback welcomed!

About to push a big optimization for big directories/collections

Comment by mongol 6 hours ago

I love that video. Was it also claude-coded?

Comment by ferd 3 hours ago

thanks! yes

Comment by Personability 10 hours ago

You see, this is the kind of thing I like to see. It's vibecoded, which is disappointing, but it's an example of what kitty can do.

Comment by Milpotel 15 hours ago

In case you don't want a terminal to mess with (or manage) windows, you can disable at least the key bindings:

enabled_layouts fat

map kitty_mod+l no_op

map kitty_mod+enter no_op

# disable open/close

map kitty_mod+n no_op

map kitty_mod+w no_op

Comment by goodmythical 8 hours ago

Genuinely confused here...release notes say improved performance, so kitten _benchmark__, right?

kitty 0.48.2 provided by fedora:

Only ASCII chars : 1.25s @ 159.8 MB/s

  Unicode chars                        : 1.05s      @ 172.8   MB/s

  Unique multi-codepoint Unicode cells : 5.17s      @ 33.9    MB/s

  CSI codes with few chars             : 1.39s      @ 71.9    MB/s

  Long escape codes                    : 1.42s      @ 551.3   MB/s

  Images                               : 1.02s      @ 524.4   MB/s

kitty 0.50 provided by install.sh:

  Only ASCII chars                     : 4.72s      @ 211.8   MB/s

  Unicode chars                        : 4.32s      @ 208.1   MB/s

  Unique multi-codepoint Unicode cells : 24.9s      @ 35.1    MB/s

  CSI codes with few chars             : 5.08s      @ 98.4    MB/s

  Long escape codes                    : 7s         @ 560.1   MB/s

  Images                               : 4.88s      @ 546.0   MB/s

I've run each multiple times and the results are similar...the new version seems to have higher throughput and yet takes longer to finish the tasks? Like, a lot longer?

Comment by goodmythical 8 hours ago

Looks a little bit like my misunderstanding as there is some suggestion that the new kitten __benchmark__ (25.4MB in the 0.48 install, 30.1MB in the 0.50 install) includes more data to more thoroughly benchmark but I can't find any citation for that and they're binaries so that's beyond my scope to inspect.

edit: Does kitten __benchmark__ rely on benchmark.py? if so comparing them on github does reveal lots of changes but I don't know where in ~300 lines changed that it indicates any of the benchmarks should be taking ~5x to complete.

Comment by a-french-anon 15 hours ago

Just a PSA for people who don't know and have a "normal" DPI monitor: bitmap fonts are intentionally not supported by Kitty.

Comment by fishgoesblub 9 hours ago

It's truly frustrating how more and more terminals refuse to support fonts that are actually sharp.

Comment by kristianp 38 minutes ago

I share your disapointment at the lack of options for bitmap fonts. For linux users the lack of Wayland support means terminals need to do the font support themselves for bitmapped fonts. After using them in Konsole, I wanted to have the same sharp fonts on the web, but that also seems a lost cause.

Comment by opan 10 hours ago

I'll never take Kitty or its dev seriously for this reason.

Comment by supersimpleguy 7 hours ago

Correct, Kovid tends to lash out when questioned.[0]

[0]:https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

Comment by Sol- 9 hours ago

I have been using Kitty for a while now because I heard it's fast and one of the cool terminals, but other than working without issue (which is good, of course), I really don't perceive any difference than if I had continued to use the Gnome terminal.

Terminal ricing is really a thing I will never understand, unfortunately. It's good and it works, but I wouldn't miss it if I had to use a less hyped terminal.

Comment by californical 8 hours ago

The biggest thing for me is keypress latency. Most other terminals have a slight delay between keypress and response. When I’m doing things like a bunch of quick commands in nvim, it can be enough to distract me.

Kitty is about instant, same with the default macOS Terminal.app. But kitty supports a few more features that I use heavily like nerd fonts, and just has better text rendering overall.

Yeah it’s not like I couldn’t work in another terminal, but my goodness it’s nice to have a tool that I use all day be as snappy and responsive as kitty

Comment by kvlx 15 hours ago

Can someone give me a use case of where terminal shaders are providing functionality, rather than eye candy? I mean I love my retro crt look, but there has to be a better reason to have shaders on a term

Comment by hcal 14 hours ago

I use a cursor following shader. It is subtle, but i feel like it draws your eye to where ever the input cursor lands. I train users on a tui application, and it seems to help them as well.

Comment by frangonf 8 hours ago

The simple cursor trail, I thought it was a gimmick at first but its useful to me for getting oriented between kitty windows, and in the same vein I'm trying out the new `focus-highlight`.

Comment by kawsper 13 hours ago

It looks cool, and it is accessibility as well as it helps me find the cursor.

People with not perfect eyesight might benefit more from it too.

Comment by isqueiros 16 hours ago

To someone uninformed, how does this compare to Ghostty?

Comment by ArchD 15 hours ago

Kitty renders some icons badly but ghostty doesn't. In a nutshell, kitty takes some rendering shortcuts that cause the bad rendering:

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/docs/faq.rst...

People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.

Comment by jcgl 14 hours ago

I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as Kitty "taking rendering shortcuts." Is this what you're referring to?

> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.

Comment by ArchD 13 hours ago

I'm not familiar with the legal technicalities around Unicode and fonts to say whether it is the fonts' fault or kitty's fault, but as a user, I see bad rendering (some icon glyphs rendered too small) in kitty but not in ghostty for icon fonts that I don't think are all that obscure.

Comment by jcgl 4 hours ago

I mean, ultimately more or less agree with you, in that software should work well for the user and do what the user wants. This is a case of this not happening. So, all things being equal, it's bad.

But things aren't all equal--there are tradeoffs at play. Kitty's choice to treat monospace fonts as actually monospaced may not fit everyone, but it's a valid decision in this design space.

Comment by sumedh 16 hours ago

Ghostty UX feels more polished compared to Kitty. I tried Kitty for a while but just did not like the default UX.

Comment by zaphirplane 15 hours ago

The default theme / fonts / colors are a lot more esthetically pleasing combination, that’s likely why you think it’s more polished ?

I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts

Comment by asdfsa32 14 hours ago

To the point that Ghosty and all other new terms are just catching up with kitty. Ghosty is celebware and will likely die away once the author loses interest, despite the flame.

Comment by fock 13 hours ago

hey, on X I read that MH has a lot of collaborators working on it (when making fun of Anti-AI stances) - looked at the repo: <5 people <5% of commits.

Comment by crossroadsguy 15 hours ago

A significant differenciator is the dev/maintainer I'd say. No, really, hear me out :) I'd start with: this goes for almost any FOSS tool, not just this. Not saying one is good, one is not – but user choices, user feedback, interactions, deisgn goals/choices get affected (and sometimes influence) a lot based on how a dev/maintainer looks at their product and humans who use, or would use, their product – or contribute for that matter.

Comment by dagurp 15 hours ago

so which one do you use and why?

Comment by flohofwoe 16 hours ago

Very similar, about the only difference from user perspective is that Kitty has a slight content 'wobble' on macOS when resizing the window (this typically happens when the content is rendered via an MTKView or CAMetalLayer and its parent view's 'layerContentsPlacement' isn't anchored to one side during window resizing). That would be trivial to fix though.

PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).

TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.

Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

Comment by darkwater 15 hours ago

> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".

Comment by flohofwoe 15 hours ago

Maybe, but it reminds me of the bad old days when Microsoft called their applications 'cross-platform', and then they just meant different flavours of Windows ;)

Comment by darkwater 14 hours ago

I mean, I share the sentiment, and IMO they should support at least the BSDs (there are official FreeBSD ports for both Kitty and Ghostty but no mentions of them in both websites)

Comment by msephton 1 hour ago

Same caveats apply to Kitty author’s other app Calibre (ebook manager)

Comment by devsda 14 hours ago

> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows

Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D

Comment by paaloeye 15 hours ago

Proper Windows support is not easy to archive. Plus with Windows Terminal being good enough and open-source, there isn't much incentive to support it.

Comment by flohofwoe 15 hours ago

Windows Terminal doesn't support Kitty Graphics Protocol (yet?: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389).

That's the one thing I always check first in a terminal because I have this pet project to run emulators in a terminal ;)

https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty

(works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)

Comment by paaloeye 15 hours ago

Honestly, as fun as it is using KGP, I don't consider it critical for any real use cases.

If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.

Comment by azuanrb 15 hours ago

UI-wise, I kinda like Ghostty more. It feels slightly more polished. However, I've moved to Kitty mainly because of its native session support. The only way to have sessions in Ghostty is through a multiplexer, which I'm not a fan of anymore.

Comment by TheRoque 16 hours ago

I haven't try Ghostty, but what I like about kitty is that it's performant, easy to customize (often it's just one line to add and you get that new feature you want), I like their defaults for tabs, layouts. It's not overwhelming but not too minimal either. I just find it's a sweet spot. I also somehow like the personality of the maintainer which seem to have a nice vision for the project. My major gripe is that it's not available on windows, but anyways I rarely use microslop products nowadays.

Comment by paaloeye 15 hours ago

AFAIK, Ghostty is as performant. At least, on macOS. I used both and didn't see much difference. Decided to go with Ghostty as it feels more native than Kitty.

Comment by TheRoque 14 hours ago

Yeah from what I've seen Ghostty is slightly more performant but they are both very performant.

Comment by mstaoru 14 hours ago

How does a non-performant terminal look? I don't think I've even seen one.

Serious question.

Comment by TheRoque 14 hours ago

Print a massive log file in kitty/ghostty, and another one with you default terminal, and you'll see a massive difference in how fast the log is printed out. Well to be honest it's just comfort, I can't claim it makes a difference in actual productivity, for me the real benefits of kitty are just the terminal multiplexer-ish capabilities (panes, sessions), other rendering niceties like adjusting the font, or having smooth scroll, sensible default shortcuts. But the actual "performance" e.g. input lag or rendering lag, I don't think it's that important.

Comment by adrian_b 10 hours ago

I frequently compile big software projects, using fast multi-core CPUs, like AMD 9950X, with which the compilation itself is really fast.

Such compilations produce a ton of text messages. With any classic terminal, the text rendering in the terminal window becomes a bottleneck, slowing down the compilation very noticeably.

With modern terminals that use GPU text rendering, like ghostty and kitty, compilations are done much faster.

Of course, with classic terminals you can redirect the compiler output, to avoid this problem, but I prefer to glance at the progress of the compilation, to notice early if there are problems.

Even in normal interactive use, there are enough cases when the difference between the instant rendering of ghostty or kitty and the slowness of the classic terminals is noticeable.

To see the difference between a slow terminal emulator, like you probably use, and a fast terminal emulator, you can do a "cat" from a text file of a few megabytes, and you will see the speed difference.

Comment by XYen0n 14 hours ago

I have previously seen programs run much more slowly when launched from the built-in terminal in a JetBrains IDE because log output was blocked.

Comment by devsda 14 hours ago

iterm2. When there's heavy logging, I've seen it lag. Doesn't feel as snappy as Kitty.

Comment by cumshitpiss 16 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by solyin 15 hours ago

> Variable font support

Okay, that's pretty cool. How does it handle spacing though? Do the columns in ls/top/etc still line up?

Comment by kzrdude 15 hours ago

Variable fonts are not necessarily non-monospace. It's about one font file for regular to bold weight and so on.

Comment by xigoi 10 hours ago

I think you are confusing variable fonts with proportional fonts.

Comment by troyvit 9 hours ago

I'm hooked on Guake/Yakuake style terminals that come down from the top of the screen like a window-shade. I can get to my terminal from any desktop and hide it when I need to get back to the gui.

I really wish I'd sit down and vibe-code is an empty window-shade that lets me plug in any terminal I choose so that I could experiment with innovative terminals like this.

Comment by DavideNL 7 hours ago

I went from Yakuake to Ghostty, and now simply use a keyboard shortcut+shell script to toggle the Ghostty window with `kdotool`...

Comment by jaen 7 hours ago

kitty apparently has this: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/quick-access-termina...

Comment by frangonf 3 hours ago

I use it constantly and with 0.50 now it's smooth and stable to resize it dynamically with the IPC remote control protocol using kitten @ resize-os-window --action=os-panel --incremental lines=<N>

Comment by troyvit 5 hours ago

I am in a dull stupid meeting and just split the widest grin. Thank you! I gave a cursory look and didn't see that.

Comment by kar1181 14 hours ago

I love that we're seeing innovation in the VT100 compatibles space still.

Comment by bombcar 10 hours ago

I have a large list of improvements I could ask for, mainly from juggling various AI terminal agents and not wanting to go full tmux.

* Ability to programmatically start and stop terminal tabs

* Multiple rows of tabs

* Full, reliable control of the formatting and color of a tab and its contents

* Tabs fully independent of but still capable of using the terminal's advanced features (read - you can restart the host terminal without closing everything)

All of these are done by at least one terminal program on Mac, none does all.

Comment by sigmonsays 9 hours ago

I never took kitty seriously because of the heavy python use, but it appears that's changed.

What parts are handled in python these days?

Comment by pmontra 14 hours ago

I am using kitty to run Claude TUI and Gnome Terminal for everything else. The reason is that kitty has basically no chrome around the terminal so there is more space for Claude to write its stuff. Furthermore it's got a different icon so I can pick it more easily from the task bar or with Alt-Tab. However it's got no menus and it takes a "man kitty" to learn how to use it (a /s to myself, I used to read the man pages of everything.) Gnome Terminal has menus and dialogs and that makes it more discoverable and easier to configure. I am using it for bash.

Comment by quibono 13 hours ago

I've used kitty before and really liked it. I am considering switching back to it now on Linux. I've been using Ghostty on macOS and loving it there, but it's quite bad on Linux.

It keeps segfaulting, takes a long time to actually start, I keep getting weird glitches whenever I have multiple panes open in a window (which is pretty much always the case), the tab bar is hard to style and I'm missing some of the macos features (like giving a tab a coloured pin).

Comment by jfsebastian 16 hours ago

Kitty is my go-to for the Linux desktop. I discovered it in an early stage and really liked it from the beginning. It’s great to see that the project continues to be developed so vigorously.

Comment by nickstinemates 9 hours ago

Do I have to `kitty ssh` to get the terminfo working on remote hosts still?

Comment by epcoa 3 hours ago

https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

https://git.zx2c4.com/calibre-mount-helper-exploit/about/

The author is essentially a malware author. I know he finally succumbed to pressure, but not until after being a complete dick and this gem:

"Sarcasm doesn't make me right, being right makes me right. The sarcasm was just a bonus earned by the sanctimoniusness of the post I was responding to."

Anybody that uses software maintained by this shit stain is playing with fire.

Comment by nomilk 14 hours ago

Anyone know if the upgrade breaks anything? (I recall a few small but annoying things broke last upgrade)

A scan of this list doesn't indicate any breaking changes: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#id1

Comment by darkwater 15 hours ago

Automated session restore might make me go back to Kitty from Ghostty.

Comment by TheRoque 16 hours ago

Nice. I love kitty. But somehow I just realized I'm stuck in 0.47 even though I'm on Fedora, it's like 6 months old. Excited to try the automated session restore.

Comment by linksbro 15 hours ago

woah, those custom shaders (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/custom-shaders/) are sick! ghostty is great, but it's missing that... spirit, that kitty seems to be bringing!

gz on the release

Comment by rbzz 11 hours ago

Ghostty has custom shaders too, with custom-shader = ~/.config/ghostty/example.glsl

Comment by omegaSigma95 16 hours ago

Tbh the quick access terminal stuff in this release is what I wanted three years ago when I wrote my own wrapper

Comment by janalsncm 16 hours ago

> Restore after logout

Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.

Comment by shevy-java 14 hours ago

For some strange reason I kind of settled on tabby. Also as an alternative on Linux (though I tend to use KDE konsole more there).

Kitty has some nice ideas, but I don't know ... I am getting lazy, so tabby works for my use cases on Windows (mostly just a fancypants wrapper over cmd.exe really; I don't even use powershell anymore, ruby or crystal cover all my scripting needs, including the assumption of OOP in shells).

Comment by miroljub 16 hours ago

It doesn't work on Windows. What are your favorite Windows alternatives?

Comment by mellosouls 16 hours ago

Windows Terminal. I used to use things like Kitty but don't see a need these days.

Comment by tappaseater 15 hours ago

Windows Terminal is surprisingly outstanding.

Comment by mkhnews 11 hours ago

It is pretty good. The font rendering isn't great tho, especially when window scaling is used.

Comment by miroljub 11 hours ago

Yep, I use the beta version of Windows Terminal, which fully supports Kitty protocols, but I'm still envious of people using Kitty directly or even Ghostty.

Comment by marttt 6 hours ago

I've been using Yori [1]. Not comparable at all to Kitty in terms of features, but a joy to use if you like a polished "Win2k feel" with only a handful of added unix-isms like decent autocomplete etc. The author's other projects might also be worth a look.

1: http://www.malsmith.net/yori/

Comment by dsign 13 hours ago

WezTerm has worked fine for me. Windows however has ConPTY which is better than what was before but still a nuisance if one whats to use advanced escape sequences and other things that modern terminals support.

Comment by m000 13 hours ago

I concur. WezTerm is my driver for the past 3-4 years. For anyone wishing to try it, make sure you grab a nightly build.

I wish there were regular official releases that would help it get more traction. Last official release is 2.5 years ago, despite continuing development. This could drive some people away. OTOH, maybe that's the point...

Comment by gib444 11 hours ago

> For anyone wishing to try it, make sure you grab a nightly

Might be helpful to explain why someone should run a nightly build of something as critical as a terminal :D

I'm running WezTerm stable currently, so am curious.

Comment by m000 3 hours ago

Users are encouraged to use the nightly:

> It may not be usable and the feature set may change, but since @wez uses this as a daily driver, its usually the best available version. [1]

Of course you don't need to install the new nightly on a daily basis. But running stable from early 2024 you're probably missing some (mostly invisible) improvements.

There was also a thread somewhere explaining why there won't be a new stable release soon. IIRC, it had to do with completing a list of tasks, some of which had some blockers outside the control of Wez. Unfortunately, I can't spot the thread.

[1] https://wezterm.org/changelog.html#continuousnightly

Comment by chii 15 hours ago

It's nowhere as featureful as kitty, but i've been using cmder and it's good enough a replacement for the default windows terminal for daily use. But if you use powershell, i m not sure what a good replacement is (but it does work in cmder iirc).

https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.

Comment by LelouBil 14 hours ago

Honestly you don't need ConEmu (the terminal emulator part of cmder) anymore with the new Windows Terminal

Comment by incognito124 14 hours ago

My favorite Windows alternative is Linux, specifically Manjaro

Comment by m000 13 hours ago

Comment by not_a9 11 hours ago

Stencil’s Tern is extremely based, but it has a bunch more features.

Comment by fernandotakai 14 hours ago

i use alacritty on every single OS and i absolutely love it.

Comment by mkhnews 11 hours ago

I want to use Alacritty on Windows, but it still has a ctrl+alt+key issue due to some upstream winit issue. Other apps seemed to have worked that out in other ways tho. I thought the font rendering in Alacritty on Windows was the best, so I still hope one day its updated with a fix.

Comment by antihero 15 hours ago

Does GhosTTY work on windows?

Comment by rmunn 15 hours ago

Not yet, but there are several projects that exist to build it for Windows: https://wintty.io/ describes itself as "A native Windows terminal built on the Ghostty core" (i.e., wrapping libghostty in a Windows application), and is probably the one I'd start with. There's also https://noctty.com/ which has taken a similar approach.

Both are clearly LLM-assisted projects, but https://noctty.com/ has a very Claude-esque front page whereas https://wintty.io/ doesn't set off my LLM detectors nearly as badly. However, Wintty's download page says "Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself" so if you decide you don't like that business model then you may wish to try Noctty, which does have prebuilt binaries.

NOTE: I have not spent any amount of time with either of those, so I can't give personal recommendations either for or against either.

Comment by righthand 8 hours ago

I like Kitty but there’s no fuzzy search built in, you have to configure it yourself; which is too bad for recommending it to others.

Comment by olivierduval 10 hours ago

I thought that it was about the term emulator KiTTY (https://www.9bis.net/kitty/ a windows GUI for Putty) but it's about a term emulator Kitty ... :-(

Seriously guys: what's the point of reusing the exact same name for the exact same product ???? Stealing history and credibilty ? Lack of imagination ? Or did someone just forgot to do its homework and checkin what already exists ?

(and if you downvote, please explain why ... KiTTY is quite a good software since 2005, more than 20 years ago, and still alive even if the last version is 0.76.1.13 from 2023)

Comment by elehack 9 hours ago

This was raised in bug trackers, and this Kitty's maintainer willfully decided to be an asshole about it. Briefly considered changing, but then didn't out some fit of pique.

Comment by krautburglar 15 hours ago

Apparently RedHat killed X11 so Kovid could go re-implement it on top of VT220. Ugh.

Comment by HasanGilani 16 hours ago

Looks fun

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by dark-star 9 hours ago

I was happy that this nice little PuTTY clone[1] finally got an update... until I realized that it was some other, unrelated terminal emulator that just happened to use the same name.

Why do people not do a web search before naming their project, to look for "prior art" under the same name sigh

[1] https://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!pages/download.md

Comment by pavelsich 12 hours ago

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Comment by Biganon 15 hours ago

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Comment by xiaoliangliang 13 hours ago

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Comment by akshit-bansal11 15 hours ago

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Comment by 0dayman 16 hours ago

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Comment by IlikeMadison 7 hours ago

No point of using Kitty when Ghostty exists. I would rather use foot or Alacritty before Kitty even. Kovid Goyal is so obtuse he berates contributors.

Mitchell Hashimoto > Kovid Goyal

Zig > Python