I’ve been happily using kitty for ages, but this butthurt “you hurt my feelings, so I am going to do the opposite” is very childish, immature and offputting.
Btw, if the author (Kovid Goyal) reads this: You really should update your homepage (https://kovidgoyal.net/). It gives me a warning:
> W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site.I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6
And it states:
> It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.4.
Anyway, for minimal work, I think you can simply remove the warning, and this statement about IE6/Mozilla 1.4, because as far as I can see, everything works fine.
Kitty is good but the only issue I have is the use of custom terminfo xterm-kitty. This means things break when ssh’ing to older Linux until you copy the terminfo manually. On BSDs it doesn’t work as there is no terminfo support.
The correct terminal type, per Dickey terminfo, is "kitty". (The PuTTY variant KiTTY is apparently also "putty".) And the terminfo database lends itself both to copying individual records and to having extra records in one's home directory.
Thanks for the insight :) I have always had a bit of 'why do I gotta know that' thing going on with terminfo, console and friends - this is making me want to dig a bit deeper!
> On BSDs it doesn’t work as there is no terminfo support
ncurses from FreeBSD Ports is built with terminfo, but the ncurses from base uses termcap. Kind of a mess :)
Most application ports have USES=ncurses without arguments, which means they will prefer the ports ncurses — if it's installed at build time. Official binary packages are built without it installed of course. So rebuilding the ncurses apps you care about would make them use terminfo.
Yep it works for the most part - I remember having weird issues once in a while - not sure if it was build from git kitty that I was using or some TERM compatibility thing.
I like kitty because it has ligature support. I haven't found many terminal emulators in the Gentoo repository that have both ligature support and are DE-independent. That's pretty much the main reason I use kitty.
Been using kitty for a bit, I essentially wanted to be able to render emojis in nvim. I haven't really thought about it since installing which is a good sign.
I really like kitty, but I always wonder how people can live without a scrollbar or smooth scrolling in general. Unfortunately that's a dealbreaker for me.
I use tmux in kitty. I rarely have to scroll and when I do, I can certainely do without smooth scrolling. Usually I just use tmux to search and jump through the output.
I was a heavy terminal user already but running macOS at work and linux at home, I got really annoyed by having to memorize different shortcuts. So I just gave up and started using tmux. Now, no matter what platform I am on, the behaviour is pretty much the same. I just use Kitty because it performs really well.
FYI you can configure mouse wheel (or in my case just trackpad) scrolling in tmux [1], I've had this configured for years and it's worked really well for me.
I work around the scrollbar issue by having keyboard shortcuts to open the full scrollback in vim, either on top of the current view or in a new tab. I was surprised how little it bothered me, and nowadays I even prefer it. You get all the text control in vim which is so much nicer than the scrollbar approach.
How does this compare to Alacritty on Linux? I've been pretty happy with Alacritty for the past few years but I'm always interested in trying new things.
Alacritty is inspired by kitty; kitty being GPU accelerated (and alacritty also being GPU accelerated).
The major difference between them is that alacritty is written in rust (and has a really nice config that auto-reloads) and kitty is written in C with a smattering of python.
I feel like Kitty has less strange bugs due to its acceleration - e.g. font rendering is more consistent with the rest of the OS, I've had less issues with mouse and keyboard support, scroolback works, etc. It just feels like a more mature project while still providing most of the benefit.
I tried Alacritty some months ago also because of a HN post.
I think it lacks features compared to Kitty. At the very least tabs for multiple sessions and support for a transparent background made it not an option for me.
Kitty has replaced the standard terminal in Ubuntu for me, and I am quite happy with its performance and Unicode support.
As someone who is currently using Alacritty, and been since it first appeared on HN (years ago?), what specific features are you missing in Alacritty that Kitty has?
I've recently made a switch to Kitty from iterm2. I couldn't suffer general slowness and visible lag when using vim or nvim anymore. Various solutions and workarounds provided only minimal relief.
With kitty the performance improvement was dramatic. Configuration is more involved (config file), but I've managed to set everything up as I'm used to in short time.
I'm happy so far, but ymmv
Similar situation here. At some point opening/closing tabs got really slow for me in iterm2 and I couldn't find a way around it. With kitty it's pretty much instant and for me worth the lack of other features.
Also, a whole lot of it is written in Python and I actually contributed smaller changes in pull requests. It feels good to be able to just change things.
I did this too and used kitty for maybe more than a year. I recently switched to gvim and using :terminal though; the font rendering is better and actually I think it's even faster. Give it a try.
P.S. weirdly on Linux it's entirely opposite; vim in an xterm is much faster than gvim.
Huh, I switched to Kitty a year or so ago and then back to iTerm when they introduced GPU acceleration. Turning off ligatures made nvm much more responsive for me.
Readit News
[0] http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md
I wonder if the author might be willing to reconsider. He should have newfound appreciation for how annoying name collisions can be.
Good to know. I'll keep avoiding his software.
> W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site.I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6
And it states:
> It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.4.
I was not quite sure if this was a joke, or if the homepage was really not updated for such a long time (it says "Created by Kovid Goyal © 2003").
Anyway, for minimal work, I think you can simply remove the warning, and this statement about IE6/Mozilla 1.4, because as far as I can see, everything works fine.
Edit: Ah, in the 2018 thread, someone noticed the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093
* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MIS-...
* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#other_vers...
The correct terminal type, per Dickey terminfo, is "kitty". (The PuTTY variant KiTTY is apparently also "putty".) And the terminfo database lends itself both to copying individual records and to having extra records in one's home directory.
* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-ki...
* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-pu...
ncurses from FreeBSD Ports is built with terminfo, but the ncurses from base uses termcap. Kind of a mess :)
Most application ports have USES=ncurses without arguments, which means they will prefer the ports ncurses — if it's installed at build time. Official binary packages are built without it installed of course. So rebuilding the ncurses apps you care about would make them use terminfo.
Also you can convert terminfo to termcap: https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/infotocap.1m.html
I was a heavy terminal user already but running macOS at work and linux at home, I got really annoyed by having to memorize different shortcuts. So I just gave up and started using tmux. Now, no matter what platform I am on, the behaviour is pretty much the same. I just use Kitty because it performs really well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehan...
Scrolling itself seems smooth for me in general.
The major difference between them is that alacritty is written in rust (and has a really nice config that auto-reloads) and kitty is written in C with a smattering of python.
I think it lacks features compared to Kitty. At the very least tabs for multiple sessions and support for a transparent background made it not an option for me.
Kitty has replaced the standard terminal in Ubuntu for me, and I am quite happy with its performance and Unicode support.
Also, a whole lot of it is written in Python and I actually contributed smaller changes in pull requests. It feels good to be able to just change things.
P.S. weirdly on Linux it's entirely opposite; vim in an xterm is much faster than gvim.