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

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

#21

Post by myrloc » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

stuartaxelowen wrote: post #17

Why use the GPU? Is terminal redraw latency really this big of a problem?

My Macbook contains a high end GPU that almost never gets used, since I am mostly writing and compiling code, building projects, etc. I'd like to offload what I can to the GPU since these activities all utilize the CPU. My terminal isn't the biggest culprit, but it can definitely hog the CPU doing certain things. Perhaps this project will help with that.

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

#22

Post by dunpeal » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

stuartaxelowen wrote: post #17

Why use the GPU? Is terminal redraw latency really this big of a problem?

It is if you have very large windows display a large amount of text with plenty of redraws.

Data analysis and data science comes to mind.

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

#23

Post by burfog » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

What I could really use would be a terminal emulator that is:

a library that I can feed data directly into (without a pty)

LGPL, MIT, or BSD

able to quickly serialize its internal state (make me a blob)

able to restore state if I feed it a blob of saved state, even across different software builds

portable to recent versions of Linux and Windows

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

#24

Post by jaxn » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

I wish this ran in Windows so I could use it with WSL.

WSL desperately needs a good terminal.

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

#25

Post by aumerle » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

stuartaxelowen wrote: post #17

Why use the GPU? Is terminal redraw latency really this big of a problem?

Why not? Is the GPU in your machine purely ornamental? More seriously https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html

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

#26

Post by dfee » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:23 AM UTC

green7ea wrote: post #20

I've switched to kitty a few months ago and it works REALLY well. It's very fast and has the best support for ligatures I've seen in a terminal. With FiraCode, it makes code beautiful in the terminal

Despite my efforts to try FC, I always come back to Monaco.

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

#27

Post by ianlevesque » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

jaxn wrote: post #24

I wish this ran in Windows so I could use it with WSL. WSL desperately needs a good terminal.

It’ll probably get one when pty support comes out this fall.

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

#28

Post by 8_hours_ago » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:30 AM UTC

burfog wrote: post #23

What I could really use would be a terminal emulator that is: a library that I can feed data directly into (without a pty) LGPL, MIT, or BSD able to quickly serialize its internal state (make me a blob) able to restore state if I feed it a blob of saved state, even across different software builds portable to recent versions of Linux and Windows

That sounds interesting! Out of curiosity, what is your use case for those features?

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

#29

Post by grp » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:30 AM UTC

burfog wrote: post #23

What I could really use would be a terminal emulator that is: a library that I can feed data directly into (without a pty) LGPL, MIT, or BSD able to quickly serialize its internal state (make me a blob) able to restore state if I feed it a blob of saved state, even across different software builds portable to recent versions of Linux and Windows

tcl.tk ?

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

#30

Post by genocidicbunny » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:31 AM UTC

heroprotagonist wrote: post #2

I was surprised that kitty became 'GPU based'. Then I realized it's an entirely different tool than the kitty fork of putty. I do wish creators of these tools would search for existing names to see if they are already in use. I would not mind if they were tools with sufficiently different purpose. But this just confuses users (and potential users) of either one.

Worse yet, they're pretty close to each other in purpose upon first glance.

I likewise thought this was KiTTY. Had to look up the actual homepage for it to confirm that I was looking at a different tool.