Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator • Hacker News Board

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#111

Post by aumerle » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:49 AM UTC

Jyaif wrote: post #88

knaik94 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some people have asked why kitty does not perform better than terminal XXX in the test of sinking large amounts of data, such as catting a large text file. The answer is because this is not a goal for kitty. kitty deliberately throttles input parsing and output rendering to minimize resource usage while still being able to sink output faster than any real world program can produce it. Reducing CPU usage, and hence b…

That... doesn't make any sense.

It's simple, take for example scrolling a file in less. Most modern terminals are fast enough that you can do it at the key repeat rate of your computer. The difference with kitty is that the scrolling feels smoother and uses less CPU, for the same task, thereby saving battery and pleasing your eyes.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#112

Post by iokanuon » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:55 AM UTC

murukesh_s wrote: post #50

adamch wrote: post #33

I've been using Kitty for a month now. I really like it. It's slightly less usable out of the box than iTerm 2. The default shortcuts are very counterintuitive (no CMD T for new tab or CMD W to close tab). But editing the preferences is straightforward. I prefer it to iTerm because it's so. Damn. Fast. It's the only software (besides Sublime) I run on my laptop that actually feels like it's using the 40 years of tran…

From a marketing perspective I was wondering how did you discover it one month back? Product hunt? or here itself ?

It's easy to find if you search for terminal emulators with low latency.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#113

Post by iddan » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:56 AM UTC

This is the real shit https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#114

Post by jakecopp » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

jjcm wrote: post #68

Side note, the author's home page is an absolute relic from the past: https://kovidgoyal.net , including things like provisions for 56k modems, iframes, detection scripts for IE3 and AOL, and other gems. It even looks like he has his own pre-jquery compliance library written about 18 years ago: https://kovidgoyal.net/scripts/VisualDocumentAPI.js

And it's so damn fast!

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#115

Post by eigenloss » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:06 AM UTC

iddan wrote: post #113

This is the real shit https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

> build: failing

:(

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#116

Post by dancek » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:13 AM UTC

yason wrote: post #95

Why render with the GPU? I don't think I've seen a visually slow terminal emulator since 2000 and barely even in the 1990's. Text rendering is basically just blitting cached glyph bitmaps into a buffer, and CPUs have been more than overly fast doing that for eons. And CPU rendering has none of the compatibility problems/quirks that GPUs have. I can fire up a Gnome Terminal onto an unaccelerated Vesa X11 display if my…

Input latency makes for a bad user experience. People just usually don't notice it when typing as it's so common. See https://danluu.com/term-latency/ for measurements of some terminal software and discussion of why latency is bad.

I'm not sure if Kitty is using GPU specifically to minimize latency, but it would be a good reason.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#117

Post by kowdermeister » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:15 AM UTC

yason wrote: post #95

Why render with the GPU? I don't think I've seen a visually slow terminal emulator since 2000 and barely even in the 1990's. Text rendering is basically just blitting cached glyph bitmaps into a buffer, and CPUs have been more than overly fast doing that for eons. And CPU rendering has none of the compatibility problems/quirks that GPUs have. I can fire up a Gnome Terminal onto an unaccelerated Vesa X11 display if my…

Nearly all text rendering libraries I've checked uses the GPU.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#118

Post by christoph-heiss » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:16 AM UTC

Another GPU-accelerated terminal emulator is alacritty[0].

Although it has a lot less features than kitty and really is only usable with tmux (or GNU screen, whatever), it is more or less perfect for people who want their terminal to do just one thing and that one thing pretty fast.

Disclaimer: Haven't tried kitty yet and using alacritty for a nearly a year now.

[0] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#119

Post by memco » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:17 AM UTC

Tried it out and it seems ok. It does seem quite responsive and wasn't too hard to customize. Doesn't have a lot of discoverability out of the box since there's no menus: I had to search through the config file to figure out that tabs exist and that to make one I need to enable the command. I would love a guide of some sort: perhaps a video showing some of the features and how they would fit into a workflow. I toyed around with tmux, but my current setup relies on panes in iterm. Since there's no option to transfer over, it'd be nice to see how to migrate. Looking forward to trying out the kittens later since I didn't mess with those at all.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#120

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:20 AM UTC

krick wrote: post #51

I love this seemingly new tendency of re-building the most basic things with much better design choices than originally made in 90-s (or 70-s) — it's sometimes baffling how people are ok with using weird unintuitive tools all day every day, because it's always been this way and after spending a couple months on it everyone gets used to it. I mean, I love how user friendly (meaning configuration and all) kitty is out…

The challenge is that if you build something new, users will expect it to have all the features that those 30 year in development tools have. Take idk, a chat client - used to be enough to have a list with just a timestamp, username and the message itself. Make a chat client nowadays and people expect emojis, pasting all kinds of images, web site previews, bot / api integration options, two factor authentication and everything from the start. The barrier to create something new is just a lot higher nowadays. IMO anyway.

Just look at how often a new product - like this one - is compared to existing products on HN, and how many comments are about what features other products have that are dealbreakers.