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Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

sw.kovidgoyal.net

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

#251

Post by snvzz »

mixedCase wrote: post #9

Best terminal I've found except for a complete deal-breaker for me: Lack of support for bitmap fonts (meaning I cannot comfortably use them in low DPI monitors), and the author has no intention of adding them. A pity, maybe some day either the author changes his mind or Alacritty will be less buggy to make it a straight upgrade to Kitty. In the meantime, Termite it is.

Likewise, I found this as I was trying to make it work with Terminus:

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/106

Obviously using the truetype version (which isn't pixel perfect but a mess) is not an option.

Too bad. I'll stick to libvte (sakura).

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

#252

Post by snvzz »

b3n wrote: post #244
C4K3 wrote: post #241

I tried kitty very briefly, but its startup speed feels very slow. As someone who prefers using my WM to manage multiple windows, a slow startup speed is absolutely killer for me. Edit: I did some basic tests using slow motion recording on my phone, and this is how long I found it took a few terminal emulators to start: (Recorded in 240FPS) - rxvt-unicode 33 frames - kitty 298 frames - lilyterm 20 frames - sakura 55…

You might like alacritty[1]. [1] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

No, he wouldn't. Latency matters to him, and alacritty has abysmal latency.

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

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

#253

Post by snvzz »

nimbius wrote: post #238

Ill give that Kitty is featureful. Not sure how many times ill need to render something i cant invoke from feh in the term, but its a neat hat trick. but fast? on an intel haswell graphics card Im seeing input latency. Sure, its technically beautiful, but the st terminal from suckless.org is lightning fast compared to this. update: this is on a 2015 macbook with retina running funtoo, so this may be a performance con…

It's not that featureful. It can't even handle bitmap fonts, only slow and blurry truetype fonts.

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

#254

Post by jamesgeck0 »

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…

Do you use tmux? The tmux/vim combo on MacOS seems to have minimal performance gains when using GPU accelerated terminals, unfortunately.

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

#256

Post by nobleach »

the_duke wrote: post #79
beefsack wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is less of an issue if you use a multiplexer like tmux, so how appropriate Alacritty is depends on how you use it.

True. I use i3 (a tiling WM) though, so tmux is redundant for me unless I work on remote machines. And I really don't want tmux running on top just for scrolling. It hurts performance quite a bit.

Add the fact that copy/paste into/out of vim gets a little more annoying. (not impossible, just more annoying)

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

#257

Post by xhrpost »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #254
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…

Do you use tmux? The tmux/vim combo on MacOS seems to have minimal performance gains when using GPU accelerated terminals, unfortunately.

This is what I was curious about as well. Screenshot shows a split screen though so perhaps some tmux-like functionality is available natively?

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

#258

Post by jamesgeck0 »

tazard wrote: post #208
jstimpfle wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's, well, slow. Haven't done any measurements, but it's noticeable. To do its work tmux must be basically another terminal emulator, and it seems it isn't the fastest at it. It's still strange, neither a little context switching (tmux is an extra process in the pipeline) nor doing the terminal things should amount to more than a millisecond. I think.

I haven't had any speed issues with tmux. Maybe you have something in your config that's slowing it down?

It's extremely noticeable in certain situations on MacOS.

Use a full screen terminal with a 12pt font on a 4K display. Split the tmux window into quarters and pull up some logs in each pane. Now use the mouse to click and drag on the center vertical border; quickly resize it from left to right. The border takes about half a second to catch up with the mouse cursor as tmux repeatedly reflows all the text on the screen.

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

#259

Post by MaxBarraclough »

blattimwind wrote: post #190
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the terminal programs don't 'announce' when they've finished rendering, the only way to this test properly would be a white-box approach, hooking into the code of the various terminal programs, right?

Grab framebuffer at refresh rate and measure the time until your end-of-test marker appears in the FB.

That'd do it.

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

#260

Post by Svoka »

Avamander wrote: post #179
jakecopp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what are you talking about. His site is served with SPDY and HTTP2 protocols https://i.imgur.com/LqGSHUj.png
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