Does it have an equivalent to iterm2’s imgcat?
Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
41–50 of 323 posts
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#42Gpu powered terminal emulator? This performs almost 100x worse than Mac OS Terminal.app. Cat-ting a long file takes 100x longer to draw on the screen! Isn’t it supposed to be faster if it’s “GPU powered”?
I thought macOS was already GPU accelerated with Quartz? And wouldn't Windows be doing something similar by now? The CPU is certainly not writing pixels directly out to VESA buffers in 2018, right?
Most Cocoa apps use the CPU backend of Core Graphics, which doesn't use the GPU for vector graphics rendering. (CG is usually what "Quartz" refers to, though the brand is so overloaded at this point that it's hard to make any general statements about it.) Cocoa apps do frequently use Core Animation for compositing surfaces together on GPU, though.
Most of what terminals have to do is blitting of prerendered text bitmaps, which is relatively slow on CPU and does benefit from the much faster memory bandwidth of the GPU. Core Graphics generally does not use the GPU for text blitting in most Mac apps, so having a custom renderer can help here. Font rasterization on the Mac does not use the GPU either, but the glyph cache hit rate for a terminal emulator is so high that it ends up pretty much irrelevant.
On Windows, Microsoft ships multiple rendering stacks for legacy compatibility. Most terminals are old Win32 programs that use classic GDI, which as far as I know is partially accelerated but mostly CPU (and implemented in the kernel!) Direct2D, the newer API, does use the GPU for blitting text. Like macOS, Windows still does all font rasterization on CPU. In GDI, font rasterization is done on CPU in the kernel (!) (except on Windows 10, in which the kernel calls out to a userspace fontdrvhost.exe). In Direct2D, font rasterization is done on CPU in userspace.
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#43Gpu powered terminal emulator? This performs almost 100x worse than Mac OS Terminal.app. Cat-ting a long file takes 100x longer to draw on the screen! Isn’t it supposed to be faster if it’s “GPU powered”?
"Some people have asked why kitty does not perform better than terminal XXX in the test of sinking large amounts of data, such as catting a large text file. The answer is because this is not a goal for kitty. kitty deliberately throttles input parsing and output rendering to minimize resource usage while still being able to sink output faster than any real world program can produce it. Reducing CPU usage, and hence battery drain while achieving instant response times and smooth scrolling to a human eye is a far more important goal."
From the performance page: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#44I like KiTTY on Windows. If you want it to be more visually appealing than PuTTY, I found this repository helpful: https://github.com/yograf/kitty-solarized
Clone it/download the .zip and replace the kitty.exe with a recent one
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#45How does this compare to alacritty?
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#46Just tried kitty on MacOS -- Loved it. The diff and icat tools are must-haves. Won't use iTerm anymore
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#47How does this compare to alacritty?
Very similar. Kitty has scrollback. Alacritty handles double/triple-click and drag correctly, although I think kitty may have fixed thia recently, making it king.
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#48This doesn't work on half of Nvidia-powered laptops: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/456
Closed and locked with:
> I'm widely known for my extreme stupidity.
Loving the zero given approach from the maintainer. Installing now.
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#49I like KiTTY on Windows. If you want it to be more visually appealing than PuTTY, I found this repository helpful: https://github.com/yograf/kitty-solarized Clone it/download the .zip and replace the kitty.exe with a recent one
Different Kitty? This one is Linux/macOS only.
Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
#50I'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 ?