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Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

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

#171

Post by coldtea »

matt4077 wrote: post #169
rbanffy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have better font rendering (anti-aliasing support on low-dpi screens), faster rendering and scrolling, better support for terminal attributes (crossed-out, overline, italic, etc). iTerm does a lot of optimizations so it can render and scroll faster (I volunteered to add a feature to it, and I dug a bit through the code). For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't. Gnome's terminal (vte, a…

Terminal.app is orders of magnitude faster than iTerm, or any other alternative. As in: less than a second v 30 seconds for cat .

With the metal renderer?

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

#172

Post by SSLy »

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 ?

https://lwn.net/Articles/753029/

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

#173

Post by dancek »

matt4077 wrote: post #170
simias wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in video and as a consequence I tend to be very sensitive to latency (I've spent more hours than I can count trying to figure out subtle synchronization issues) yet I've just spent one minute trying to detect input latency on my st terminal (which fares pretty badly in the benchmark you linked) without success. And that's running inside tmux on top of that. That being said I think it is valuable to have a reas…

I would have said the same, until I recently had to boot into an UEFI shell. Input was just so .... immediate? It’s really hard to describe, but it was surprisingly obviou.

Yeah, the feeling is pretty much "the letter appears while I'm pushing the key down" vs. "the letter appears when the key returns to the top position". Both feel immediate in their own way.

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

#174

Post by dancek »

tpolzer wrote: post #127
dancek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Usually, offloading to the GPU will get you higher throughout but also higher latency. Although of course this assumes a sane software renderer, X11 API calls will take forever.

Really? It's counterintuitive considering the GPU draws the screen anyway. Is it because the shader pipeline has some inherent latency that a software renderer doesn't?

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

#175

Post by Giroflex »

unixhero wrote: post #55

Not to be confused with Kitty, the terminal emulator. http://www.9bis.net/kitty/

Yup, I was reading through thinking there was some major update to Kitty and was a bit confused when the page said it was only available for Linux and Mac.

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

#176

Post by morsch »

ryenus wrote: post #71
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…

Have you managed to configure it to behave similar to iTerm 2 in terms of keyboard shortcuts? Would you please share your config? One thing is, I don't get its layout , is it possible to create a vertical/horizontal split like what (shift+)cmd+d does in iTerm 2?

Ctrl-Shift-Enter opens a new "window" -- this is the terminology in the Kitty docs; it's a new terminal within the same frame, both being visible at the same time.

Ctrl-Shift-L goes through all enabled layouts. A layout specifies how the "windows" are arranged. Simple splits are available among others. I like the stacked layout: window 1 fills the full height on the left half of the screen, all other windows are stacked on the right half.

There does not seem to be a way to control the borders within the layout with the mouse; e.g. temporarily resize window 1 in the example above to be 80% of the width. That's something I sometimes miss. It's configurable, of course, but not ad hoc.

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

#177

Post by kritixilithos »

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…

As another user of iTerm2, I am currently using several keyboard mappings from key to key (like Tab being interpreted as Esc), do you know whether Kitty supports that? As far as I can see in the docs, only examples of key to action are shown.

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

#178

Post by Avamander »

sime2009 wrote: post #158
oever wrote: post #139

Two simple speed tests: time find ~ /dev/null takes 8 seconds alacritty takes 8.5 seconds and uses 75% CPU kitty takes 15 seconds and uses 100% CPU konsole takes 16 seconds and uses 100% CPU time for i in {1..2000000}; do echo $i; done /dev/null takes 8 seconds alacritty takes 16 seconds and uses 75% CPU kitty takes 17 seconds and uses 100% CPU konsole takes 16 seconds and uses 98% CPU

Can we not start throwing around these bullshit `time blah` tests. They don't measure what people thing they measure. It doesn't measure rendering speed at all. It does vaguely measure two things: 1) How big the buffer is on the terminal when it reads in lots of output. If the buffer is as big as the output then your test reports a figure close to the `/dev/null` test. Not useful. 2) How well the terminal is in SKIPP…

Please suggest better methods then.

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

#179

Post by Avamander »

jakecopp wrote: post #114
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!

Could be even faster with modern tech like HTTP2, HTTP2/PUSH, gzip, brotli and all that while looking much nicer with some basic CSS. Some additional speed could probably be squeezed out with something like anycast DNS.

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

#180

Post by zaat »

hd4 wrote: post #145
oever wrote: post #139

Two simple speed tests: time find ~ /dev/null takes 8 seconds alacritty takes 8.5 seconds and uses 75% CPU kitty takes 15 seconds and uses 100% CPU konsole takes 16 seconds and uses 100% CPU time for i in {1..2000000}; do echo $i; done /dev/null takes 8 seconds alacritty takes 16 seconds and uses 75% CPU kitty takes 17 seconds and uses 100% CPU konsole takes 16 seconds and uses 98% CPU

I'm guessing you're on KDE (as am I) but it would be cool to see GNOME Terminal compared also. What I got from these results is that Konsole is already good enough to not bother switching.

I switched from Gnome Terminal after running large duplicity backup with -v failed repeatedly, apparently because the terminal didn't held the load. Switching to urxvt256-ml solved the problem.
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