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Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

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Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#61

Post by M95D »

kstrauser wrote: post #24
JdeBP wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't confuse the novices. A console is either a special kernel device or a UI subsystem; a terminal is a physical piece of kit; and a terminal emulator is an application that runs on a general purpose computer that emulates one of the aforementioned pieces of kit. * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html * https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/freebsd-conso... * https://jdebp.uk…

Technically true, but I’ve never heard anyone say “open a terminal emulator and type…”

Because people say "open a command prompt". That can be a terminal emulator, a kernel console on screen+keyboard, a terminal via serial port console, or a ssh connection, and usually it doesn't matter which.

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#62

Post by skayvr »

mmgutz wrote: post #33
skayvr wrote: post #8

My progression has been st -> kitty -> ghostty. I wanted to love st, but found too many unpolished corners. Kitty was great, but it felt like the exact opposite of st. Very large and opinionated. ghostty, at least originally, was new and something between st and kitty. With claude code I wonder where the landscape of personalized software will land. st and others may be on to something in this era.

[foot]( https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot ) is an excellent st alternative on wayland.

Thanks, this is right down my alley. When I make the switch from X to Wayland, I'll check this out.

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#64

Post by JdeBP »

fluoridation wrote: post #42
JdeBP wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't confuse the novices. A console is either a special kernel device or a UI subsystem; a terminal is a physical piece of kit; and a terminal emulator is an application that runs on a general purpose computer that emulates one of the aforementioned pieces of kit. * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html * https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/freebsd-conso... * https://jdebp.uk…

You're assigning a rigidity to these terms that they simply don't have. A "console", in the oldest sense of the term, is any place where a user interfaces with a computer, or more broadly with any kind of machine. >Borrowed from French console (“bracket”, noun), from consoler (“to console, to comfort”, verb). Sense of “bracket” either due to a bracket alleviating the load, or due to brackets being decorated with the…

On the contrary, I've quite explicitly pointed out that a console is one of several things, in contrast to the false claim that these are all just the same thing. Go back and read the FGA.

A console is not even necessarily the same abstraction as a terminal, let alone always synonymous with a terminal emulator, and "referring to a terminal emulator as a console" is not only not perfectly acceptable, it is downright erroneous on all of the platforms on which Kitty runs including the platform used by unpopularopp where XNU's console is very specifically a serial or video special kernel device. You are confusing the novices, too.

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#66

Post by JdeBP »

M95D wrote: post #61
kstrauser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically true, but I’ve never heard anyone say “open a terminal emulator and type…”

Because people say "open a command prompt". That can be a terminal emulator, a kernel console on screen+keyboard, a terminal via serial port console, or a ssh connection, and usually it doesn't matter which.

At least Microsoft finally stopped making people think (on Windows NT, no less) that these were "DOS prompts", though, which used to be a very common misnomer.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/a-cli-is-not-a-dos-prompt.html

You'll rarely find them actually called "command prompt" on the operating systems that Kitty runs on, though, including the operating system that unpopularopp uses. That's largely a Microsoft-ism, and one that has in fact been quietly eroding in the Microsoft world for years since the advent of PowerShell and Microsoft Terminal, with people now more and more writing and talking about opening "PowerShell" or "Terminal" rather than opening "command prompt".

On the operating systems that Kitty runs on, they're called terminal emulators, especially in their own doco and blurbs (as with Kitty, here), and when it comes to desktop menus usually (in contrast to the Microsoft Windows "command prompt" shortcut) have their actual names (Konsole, XTerm, UXTerm, RXVT Unicode, and so on being listed under their names, with GNOME Terminal and its derivatives and Apple's Terminal being somewhat exceptional rather than the rule).

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#67

Post by fluoridation »

JdeBP wrote: post #64
fluoridation wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assigning a rigidity to these terms that they simply don't have. A "console", in the oldest sense of the term, is any place where a user interfaces with a computer, or more broadly with any kind of machine. >Borrowed from French console (“bracket”, noun), from consoler (“to console, to comfort”, verb). Sense of “bracket” either due to a bracket alleviating the load, or due to brackets being decorated with the…

On the contrary, I've quite explicitly pointed out that a console is one of several things, in contrast to the false claim that these are all just the same thing. Go back and read the FGA. A console is not even necessarily the same abstraction as a terminal, let alone always synonymous with a terminal emulator, and "referring to a terminal emulator as a console" is not only not perfectly acceptable, it is downright e…

>"referring to a terminal emulator as a console" is not only not perfectly acceptable

To clarify, you don't like it.

>it is downright erroneous on all of the platforms on which Kitty runs

You make it sound like saying something "erroneous" (which of course I don't agree it is) is some kind of magic spell that does something. "Kitty is a console." What, what did that do?

>You are confusing the novices, too.

Uh huh. Literally no one is confused by these terms, you're just disagreeing with the usages. Say to someone "open up an xterm console" and I guarantee you they will understand that you want them to start an instance of xterm, not that you're having a stroke.

>XNU's console is very specifically a serial or video special kernel device.

If a system uses a word to refer to something specific, that doesn't co-opt the meaning of the word. An "XNU console" and a "console" in the broad sense are distinguishable concepts.

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#68

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

I switched to kitty after a periodic assessment of my user environment. Turns out, of modern terminal emulators, only Kitty is under a copyleft license. Considering, most of them are pretty capable and competitive, this was enough to switch.

What I don't like:

- No remote terminal persistence solution in the works + termux/screen incompatibility.

- Two modes of font rendering and both are meh. Legacy is uneven and jagged, modern has unbalanced perceived font thickness for dark-on-light and light-on-dark, and the modifications can only make it more unbalanced.

Have no complaints besides that. Default keybindings are ok, performance is great, features are plenty, configuration is easy. Font config `kitten` is great.

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#69

Post by slightwinder »

jhbadger wrote: post #22
fishgoesblub wrote: post #5

Unfortunately the dev intentionally refuses to add Bitmap font support for fonts like Terminus.

The author is an interesting character of strong, often contrarian, opinion. He's also the guy behind the Calibre e-book software, which was largely written in Python 2 long after that was deprecated. He even wanted to maintain Python 2 himself rather than rewrite Calibre, but he eventually realized that wasn't feasible and ported Calibre to Python 3.

This reads as if he started Calibre when Python 2 was already deprecated..but to be clear, it was started some years before the first release of Python 3, 14 years before the deprecation.

And at the time of the beef, many bigger apps were not ported yet (some even till today). The authors' opinion was more an extremer version of something the whole community felt at the time.

Re: Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator

#70

Post by zamalek »

skayvr wrote: post #8

My progression has been st -> kitty -> ghostty. I wanted to love st, but found too many unpolished corners. Kitty was great, but it felt like the exact opposite of st. Very large and opinionated. ghostty, at least originally, was new and something between st and kitty. With claude code I wonder where the landscape of personalized software will land. st and others may be on to something in this era.

I recently switched back to kitty from ghostty. Ghostty was taking > 1s to boot, and I really don't have the time to debug it.
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