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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

#221

Post by christoph-heiss »

hdra wrote: post #137
christoph-heiss wrote: post #118

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

I was pretty impressed when I found alacritty a while ago, but I stopped using it as I soon found out that pretty much any speed gain I got from using the terminal is pretty much negated from having to use tmux in order to have any form of window management..

Are you by chance on macOS?

This seems to be a general issue on macOS with any terminal emulator, according to [0].

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

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

#223

Post by btschaegg »

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…

> I prefer it to iTerm because it's so. Damn. Fast.

Yup, I was also pretty surprised by this. I switched to Kitty recently, after terminology broke for me after an update. It's surprisingly hard to find terminal emulators that run on Xorg and on Wayland without making a fuzz.

Kitty does this beautifully and I had a real a-ha moment because of its speed the first time I tried it.

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

#224

Post by rovr138 »

colordrops wrote: post #134
fcarraldo wrote: post #7

Not affiliated, but recently switched to Kitty from iTerm 2 on OS X on my main at-work MacBook Pro and I’ve been very impressed. It’s snappy, easy to configure and works well with my zsh/tmux setup with a few tweaks. I would love to drop tmux in favor of kitty’s sessions and multiplexing, but old habits die hard, so it will take some time.

What does kitty buy you on top of tmux that is worth locking yourself into a particular terminal?

Speed.

Locking how? He can keep his tmux configuration and use it when he needs to in the future.

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

#225

Post by sevensor »

nerdponx wrote: post #217
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…

It's the only software (besides Sublime) I run on my laptop that actually feels like it's using the 40 years of transistor improvements I'm paying for. I wish more software fell into this category. It's still a little odd to me that something as conceptually simple as a terminal emulator should require a full blown GPU in order to perform smoothly.

It's more that we've introduced tons of layers between keypress and screen. This is very useful, but it introduces latency throughout the system. Figthing the latency while keeping the features means we have to adopt new techniques.

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

#226

Post by syn0byte »

jbb67 wrote: post #211

I don't even know where to start with this. We had terminals that were way faster than you could type or see 30 years ago. They didn't need a GPU and ran on a CPU 1000 times slower than what we have now. If this is progress... I'm not sure I want it

They were also char based display at something like 320x240 resolution and maybe 16-256 colors.

Modern displays at 1920x1080 in millions of colors.

30 years ago a terminal was the whole display and nothing more. Now its a single window amid dozens of other windows including content ranging from high definition video to real-time rasterized 3D graphics.

Yes, that's progress.

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

#227

Post by adamch »

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 ?

I wanted to try a new terminal, so I looked up the terminal latency comparison article that was making the rounds a few months ago. Of the ones that ran on OSX, Kitty seemed to be worth trying.

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

#228

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Because on moder hdpi screens, text rendering involves pushing around a lot of pixels. Especially if you do stuff like having translucent windows, aliasing, complex font rendering, smooth scrolling, etc. So, it kind of makes sense to use the GPU for this. Of course on OSX, much of the desktop is already hardware accelerated so it is easy to overstate the impact here. Apple fixed this when they launched OSX in 2000 or so.

I've been using iterm for years; when they introduced their metal rendering backend the impact was very subtle but noticable. Anyway, given the amount of time I spend using cli stuff, it kind of matters.

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

#229

Post by sevensor »

guitarbill wrote: post #65
Rantenki wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed and locked with: > I'm widely known for my extreme stupidity. Loving the zero given approach from the maintainer. Installing now.

Kovid Goyal is infamous/known to be a bit toxic, see Calibre: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946 (and the setuid "issue": https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ )

Personally I'm willing to give the guy a chance -- unaware of this history, I reported an issue with kitty on Github after the last time it was posted to HN. I received a helpful and polite response. He took the time to do some investigation and explain what was going on. I was taken seriously. He may have a reputation for being difficult, but it was not in evidence.

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

#230

Post by adamch »

boobsbr wrote: post #206
wiz21c wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you code in the console with this : https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode ??? Dunno...

In this case, it's more of a 'nice to have' feature than a 'I need it' feature.

Ligatures make Haskell, Rust and JS roughly 18 times more readable, I've gotten so used to them that I hate reading code without them.
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