[HN Gopher] Kitty - the fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emu...
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Kitty - the fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
Author : Gedxx
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-09-30 19:53 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sw.kovidgoyal.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (sw.kovidgoyal.net)
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _Kitty_
|
| Not gputty? OK, I will call it gpussy, then.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I use it. It's nice but it causes a ~30 watt spike in power usage
| whenever I put it in the foreground. Laptop users, be advised
| that this terminal could drain your batteries.
| petepete wrote:
| I've used Kitty daily for years and it's brilliant. It just does
| the simple things really well and crazy fast. Can't really find
| fault.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Not that xterm is "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"...
| garou wrote:
| I dont like their approach in the issue of "Kitty Only uses Dark
| colors"[1]
|
| 1. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/197
| shirakawasuna wrote:
| Treating accessibility like an aesthetic choice...
| cosmojg wrote:
| Not really. Did you read the issue thread? He's enforcing the
| spec. If anything, that _improves_ accessibility since that
| 's what specs are for, maximizing accessibility.
| reaperducer wrote:
| You should ask for your money back.
| kemayo wrote:
| Kovid Goyal is a person with forcefully presented opinions.
| I've submitted bugs to Calibre before, so I can vouch that his
| style remains the same.
| garou wrote:
| Yeah. I've tried the Kitty last year and when my colors
| showed different I found this Issue already closed and with
| some strong words/opinions from him. Hard to like it.
| cosmojg wrote:
| He's not wrong, though. He's following the spec, and users
| are asking him to violate it to be compatible with programs
| which also violate it. If everyone just followed the spec,
| however, colors would work beautifully for everyone all the
| time without anyone having to worry about weird edge cases
| in specific programs.
|
| If a program you run in Kitty displays incorrect colors
| because it's hijacked bolding instead of implementing
| proper color support, you should absolutely go and make the
| issue known to the authors of said program as they are the
| ones who fucked up by violating the spec in the first
| place.
|
| The whole point of standards is to make the relevant
| technologies more accessible. Developers too often break
| spec without regard for accessibility, all in the name of
| cool new features. This is bad, and it makes sense to
| discourage it by simply enforcing the spec.
| wetpaws wrote:
| I find his replies polite, firm and to the point.
|
| Just because his position does not match other folks, it
| does not mean he is wrong.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Kitty is the only thing I miss from Linux since I'm using WSL 2.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| Have you tried running a x11 server on wsl? I heard that it
| works with a bit of linux-foo, might work for kitty
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I use kitty on WSL via vcxsrv but I had to hack the OpenGL
| support. X410 should work.
| wef wrote:
| ... and it's wayland-native!
|
| Just a quick question while I'm here - what really is the point
| of using the GPU? Surely the CPU is adequate for a terminal's
| modest needs?
|
| ... I have an NVidia POS on my lappy but I don't game or use the
| GPU at all - in fact I removed the drivers so it doesn't drain
| the battery at all.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I rarely use anything new because my work environment is holy,
| but I tried Kitty because it had a Unicode menu built-in. I like
| to send unicode smileys to friends on IRC. :)
|
| Anyways here are my impressions after 1 month.
|
| 1. You have to transfer terminfo to all ssh servers because the
| kitty term does not exist there.
|
| 2. By default mouse selection with double click + drag to select
| multiple lines is not normal. I believe this could be fixed but I
| haven't figured out how yet. (I could not re-create this right
| now, maybe it was fixed in some recent upgrade)
|
| 3. Unlike gnome-terminal (my old default) it actually opens up to
| fullscreen if you used it in fullscreen mode last.
|
| 4. Unlike gnome-terminal I could immediately figure out how to
| make it open up a few default tabs like a session on start up.
|
| 5. Its CLI tools don't accept the same arguments when defining a
| session, as when using them outside of the session definition.
| This was barely documented.
|
| Overall the impression is good because I'm still using it. I
| rarely use anything new this long if it has issues affecting my
| workflow.
| [deleted]
| krzyk wrote:
| How does performance compare to st? Has any one tested both?
| nixpulvis wrote:
| While this doesn't have test for _everything_ you might care
| about, https://github.com/alacritty/vtebench could help you
| answer this question on your own machine.
|
| Simply run the tool within the terminal under test. It's quite
| easy to use.
| schmuelio wrote:
| I haven't used a considerable amount of time using st (I think
| for a total of 2 days on a VM?) I liked st just fine but I
| found the day-to-day performance of kitty really solid.
|
| It feels like kitty takes _slightly_ longer to start up but
| it's still a tiny amount of time.
|
| There's also the different configuration options, kitty has a
| config file but st (if memory serves) needs to be recompiled
| for changes.
|
| I've found that initially kitty can have trouble rendering
| fonts with correct spacing but that takes a couple of minutes
| to tweak to your liking. And I think the colour configurations
| are a little more complex? I haven't had to change the config
| for a while though.
|
| The GPU acceleration does make stdout much faster if it's
| unbuffered (in my experience) and on a 144hz monitor it looks
| so much smoother.
|
| Hopefully that's enough of a comparison? Sorry I couldn't give
| more feedback, as mentioned I've only used st for a short time.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You can also use kitty -1 to use a single instance of kitty
| although the startup time is already so small I doubt you
| could tell the difference without measuring
| JNRowe wrote:
| I use both, but don't really feel like there is a useful
| comparison.
|
| My lightly patched st /feels/ better IME, but it doesn't have
| anywhere near the same featureset. kitty has its fancier font
| support and cool kittens which make the comparison very uneven.
|
| I limit my kitty use to a single long running instance as my
| vim terminal, taking advantage of its far better rendering for
| pretty symbols and inline images via the icat kitten. For
| everything else I find st/urxvt far more useful, in spite of
| the occasional rendering errors and font selection problems.
| Even going so far as to fiddle with sxiv's Xembed support to
| weakly imitate kitty's icat from time to time.
| sseneca wrote:
| I've used both. I have no figures but kitty feels at least as
| fast as st with infinitely more features and a proper
| configuration system.
| haecceity wrote:
| icat and diff programs are nice but I've never thought other
| terminals needed to print or scroll faster.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Then your workflow is different from other people who do need
| this feature.
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| Just this week I started using kitty as my terminal. Overall I
| have liked it and I really love the icat kitten so I can "cat"
| image files directly in my terminal.
|
| I haven't yet figured out how to change my font color from white
| to amber (which has been a preference of mine). I've tried just
| setting color7 and color15 to the amber hex color that I like,
| but that isn't doing it.
|
| The other thing I can't figure out is how to get it to stop
| updating the window title. I know most people probably prefer it,
| I just don't want it to change every time I change directories.
| There is an obvious preference for that in gnome-terminal and I
| can't figure it out in kitty.
| withaplomb wrote:
| tmux -CC mode support? Stuck on macOS for iterm2 as that's the
| only terminal that seems to have it.
| slobiwan wrote:
| I suppose there are only a few words that end in tty, but I was a
| little surprised this wasn't a GPU enhancement to the already
| nice Kitty [http://www.9bis.net/kitty] which is based on Putty
| [https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/], both
| Windows programs.
| [deleted]
| yewenjie wrote:
| How does this compare with Alacritty?
| gavinray wrote:
| Alacritty + Starship is heaven
|
| https://starship.rs/
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Perhaps run them both and let us know.
| diath wrote:
| Personally when I tried both (I used a dozen of different
| terminal emulators to test them out and see which one I like
| the best) it boiled down to the fact that I had some test file
| for Unicode characters that Kitty (and I believe Sakura?) were
| the only terminals that could render it properly, Alacritty was
| second best but it was pretty broken. Other than that feature
| wise I didn't feel like either of them was missing anything
| (for my personal use case). Alacritty has a bit faster startup
| time though which can be noticable.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Alacritty has fewer features (by design) i think. Alacritty is
| more supposed to be used with something like screen or tmux
| while Kitty has tabs, splits and so on.
| shirakawasuna wrote:
| My understanding with Alacritty is that functionality like
| tabs would be up to downstream software to implement. So I
| create a new project called "UltraAwesomeTerminal" and use
| Alacritty as a library.
|
| Is that accurate? I'm kind of unsure.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Our position is that tabs is the job for your window
| manager. I, for example, run `i3` which makes implementing
| tabs in Alacritty a non-issue for me.
| unixhero wrote:
| Sigh. There's already a project called Kitty. The fork [0] of
| Putty.
|
| 0, http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Kitty is indeed great and I can corroborate the high performance
| by joining at the macOS activity monitor. Almost zero even with
| high speed scrolling.
|
| I kinda wish there was a GUI configuration method though. But
| considering it's a terminal emulator it's not a big deal.
| memco wrote:
| I'm also a macOS Kitty user. The config did take a minute to
| get used to, but the docs are pretty clear and it's really nice
| to be able to add the config to your dotfiles repo and have it
| available on all machines. My favorite feature though is the
| auto layout: it's really nice to be able to quickly switch to
| different layouts without having to manually move things and
| also not have to worry if something is going to fit into the
| space I have. The perf is nice too!
|
| One thing I never figured out was how to properly set the
| terminal when on remote machines: it defaults to xterm-kitty,
| which led to problems trying to run nano on those servers. The
| only thing I dislike is the look of the tabs: compared to the
| OS native tabs it's a bit underwhelming, but they work fine.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| For servers that have older versions of ncurses, you can run
| this command from kitty to install the xterm-kitty terminfo
| files on the remote host: kitty +kitten ssh
| user@host
| memco wrote:
| Thanks! Seems to resolve the term issue albeit at the cost
| of having to remember to use the kitten instead of standard
| SSH.
| em500 wrote:
| Solution is in the FAQ:
| https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-
| about-...
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