Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator (sw.kovidgoyal.net)

Kitty terminal can essentially replace a big part of a linux desktop environment, if you want it to. It's infinitely customizable AND has own opinions at the same time.

Also my interactive scrollbar change was recently merged in, so if that was stopping you, you can now replace iTerm on your mac with it :)

Whoever designed the default bindings for kitty clearly has a similar brain to mine. I think I adapted to those keybindings in about an hour, and can't use any other terminal without remapping the keys to match kitty.

Probably the best terminal emulator in existence today. It really pushes the envelope of what's possible to do with terminals. Also has superb font rendering and is very customizable.

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

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.

Is this different from the KiTTY variant of PuTTY?

https://www.9bis.net/kitty/index.html

I'm just confused now, haha. What's in a name, anyways...

I'm probably the extreme minority on HN (0.00001%) but I pretty much never used any CLI applications. Just never really needed them. But recently at work (we use Macs) I had some tasks which need the Terminal.app so I kinda tried to dig in and learn some stuff but whenever I feel I already know something (more or less) there is always some new stuff entering the picture next day. Shell, console, terminal... now a terminal _emulator_ :insert exploding galaxy brain meme:

so many advances in computer graphics to end up rendering text.

Currently I use ghostty but kitty was my daily driver for years. It works great on old macOs too.

kitty is great, but I stopped using it because iTerm's terminal search feature - which I use almost daily - is much more ergonomic. The existing solution in kitty (pipe scrollback buffer to something like less/vim and search with /) is a lot worse IMO which is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me

My favorite aspect of kitty is the infinite scrollback. My scrollback is 10000 lines long and scrollback buffer itself can store 1 GB worth of history.[0] When you hit a certain shortcut, you can use any pager to search through the scrollback. It's all very fast.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/84225d914acd226863e...

Is it really that hard to add Windows support for these terminal projects? I understand they are more valued in Linux circles but it's not like nobody on Windows is using the terminal.

Kovid is sort of an arrogant douchebag https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946

I haven't done extensive tests, but wouldn't a GPU-based terminal emulator cause a laptop to use a lot more power at idle or near idle?

Even if the GPU is more efficient than the CPU, I would think it's better to keep the GPU asleep when you're just typing in vim.

I really like kitty. The customisability is off the charts, especially the remote control feature and the kittens feature. You can do almost anything with a combination of those two.

At the same time, it's perfectly usable with opinionates defaults.

Run `kitten` and check out the default kittens, there are some gems in there.

It's amazing what happens between N_TTY and the terminal to get information from an app to our eyeballs.

What even is the architecture of this project 1/3 python, 1/3 C and 1/3 Go? What? Why?

Maybe it is just me, xterm does the job, and my Enlightenment theme days are long gone.

I see no need for the GPU trendy terminals, and same applies to running HLSL shaders on Windows Terminal.

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.