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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

#281

Post by cmsj »

vanviegen wrote: post #274
Twirrim wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware. If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run. It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on s…

To be fair, the text mode rendering you're using as a benchmark, is implemented in hardware as well.

Indeed, a more fair comparison is to compare GNOME Terminal to xterm. You should see that xterm is way faster, but it's also uglier and has far fewer features. Overhead isn't always about worthless bloat.

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

#282

Post by muhammadusman »

Spiritus wrote: post #85
muhammadusman wrote: post #75

I can't seem to get the config changes to show up on my install, is there something I'm missing in my setup? I update the config, save it, quit Kitty and start it up again, nothing still :/

The file is in a different location depending on OS. For example on macOS it’s ~/Library/Preferences/kitty/kitty.conf

Thanks, didn't realize that :o

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

#284

Post by fastball »

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…

iTerm's 2 global hotkey + half screen pane combo has been stuck on it. Not gonna leave until I can do the same with another terminal emu.

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

#285

Post by oomem »

morsch wrote: post #176
ryenus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stac…

It seems heavily inspired by xmonad.

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

#288

Post by memco »

adimitrov wrote: post #128
memco wrote: post #119

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…

And now I feel old. Menus in a terminal? Videos explaining a terminal emulator ? Migration guide from arbitrary terminal emulators configs? Get off my lawn! Kids these days, never having had to compile their own xterm and then seeing the light of our holy lord and saviour rxvt, and its endless man pages. There's a huge configuration doc[1], and the homepage already does a very good job of introducing you to its featu…

Eventually I was able to figure things out and more or less the process was simple enough using the config file.

However, there are several behaviors that are atypical for OSX applications such as missing conventional system shortcuts and some things I consider confusing such as the fact that there are OS windows and then there are "windows" which are similar to panes in iTerm, but are not actually windows. Perhaps for other terminals or systems this is normal, but it isn't exactly par for the course for the tools I've worked with prior.

One of the best things about OSX is that every item that is available in the menu bar has a clear shortcut associated with it and a very helpful search box available via the cmd+? key combo which works as a shortcut for anything you don't happen to know the shortcut to offhand. Menus happen to be one of the fastest ways to navigate OSX with a keyboard for me. This app does not have any menus to speak of, which is fine, but it just makes it that much harder to figure things out on your own.

As for the video suggestion: some things just don't translate as well as text for me (I am legally blind: not afraid to RTFM, but sometimes reading is asking a bit more for me than others). Sometimes it's nice to see how someone else does it because it helps when you don't know how to do something on your own. Even an asciinema style demo is quite helpful for certain tools here and there.

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

#289

Post by wodenokoto »

Twirrim wrote: post #271
twtw wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Everything that seems smooth is that way because of the GPU.

It's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware. If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run. It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on s…

Until you think about how complex text is in a modern graphical environment. Thousands of different characters, many of which can compose, all vectors with curves that needs to be rendered, and visually optimised with regards to their position relative to the screen pixels, but also optimised wrt their size.

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

#290

Post by btschaegg »

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 also re-tried Alacritty recently, but I had severe issues using it in Sway. If it's one of two tiled windows, it warps the text in the terminal, so it isn't really usable for me.
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