Kitty 0.50(sw.kovidgoyal.net)
161 pointsby porridgeraisin3 hours ago27 comments
  • anonymous_i2 hours ago
    I recognized him name from Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/about

    What a legend.

    • Alien1Being2 hours ago
      It is the Gimp of book management.

      Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.

      Works amazingly well.

      Looks amazingly bad.

      • kar118112 minutes ago
        So true. Main thing is both are still being built and used everyday though.
      • osener38 minutes ago
        What does that even mean. It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?

        He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained. He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.

      • piokochan hour ago
        Frankly? Who care. Napster had even worst GUI, yet it has become popular as it just did the job people wanted.
        • rithdmcan hour ago
          Did Napster have many competitors at the time?
          • 63stack31 minutes ago
            Kaazaa, emule, dc++
            • riffraff22 minutes ago
              Those came one or more years after Napster, when it was already wildly popular because it was the only tool that did that job.

              Like calibre, I guess :)

    • vconnor2 hours ago
      When I first used Calibre I thought it was a disorganised mess trying to cram too many features in one app.

      Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.

      I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.

    • Onavoan hour ago
      I don't see why people are complaining about the UI. The calibre codebase is just Python and you can vibe code/customize a nicer UI for it in minutes. It's not like the core changes much. Their metadata resolution and Epub handling and (formerly DRM cracking) are best in class.
      • lowdudean hour ago
        Vibe-coded or not, I prefer staying close to upstream unless I have very good reasons not to, and I would not want to have to half-heartedly maintain a UI fork of this. I would still be quite excited about an official visual overhaul, though
      • latexr33 minutes ago
        Can we please stop with the suggesting vibe coding for everything? That’s not an interesting response, it doesn’t advance the discussion and no one learns anything. The goal of this website is (ostensibly) intellectual curiosity, and suggesting AI as a solution to every problem is basically a thought-terminating cliché.
  • petepete3 hours ago
    I love Kitty. I've used it since discovering it in about 2019 and it strikes the right balance of things.

    It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.

    I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.

    • vidarhan hour ago
      When I used Kitty, I hacked in a shader that'd render a crude glow around the letters so that I could use more translucent backgrounds and still have readable text. I have no idea where that code is - I haven't used Kitty for years. But that's the kind of thing that'd be great to do with the shader support.
  • dagi3d28 minutes ago
    I really love Kitty, it took me only about 5 minutes to migrate from Ghostty. just wish the used this icon as default: https://github.com/DinkDonk/kitty-icon
    • ssernikk15 minutes ago
      I use this icon too! Only thing I customize after installing kitty.
    • HIP_HOP23 minutes ago
      I'm curious, why did you move if there is also now the new Ghost TTI with 0.4? What do you benefit from this?
      • ssernikk14 minutes ago
        Not OP, but I've moved back to kitty because of ghostty horrendous startup time on linux
        • kar118110 minutes ago
          That's a one time cost though isn't it? It's a tradeoff, but once it is booted it's blazing though.
  • nomilk23 minutes ago
    Anyone know if the upgrade breaks anything? (I recall a few small but annoying things broke last upgrade)

    A scan of this list doesn't indicate any breaking changes: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#id1

  • kar11819 minutes ago
    I love that we're seeing innovation in the VT100 compatibles space still.
  • ivolimmen32 minutes ago
    I use multiple terminals. I like Ghostty and Kitty. I the past I tried multiple others like Guake, Allacritty, xterm, Gnome Terminal, ITerm (when I was forced to use a Mac), Windows Terminal (I am now forced to work on Windows). And of all terminals I still prefer Kitty. There is one feature Kitty has that no other has (or not yet) and that is the 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.
    • nomilk25 minutes ago
      > 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.

      When do you use this? (guessing, when you run something that crashes the terminal?)

      Possibly related: I use ctrl+shift+h (and somehow configured it to use neovim), which is a nice way to navigate the terminal history - useful when pilfering through thousands of lines of local server logs

  • pmontra43 minutes ago
    I am using kitty to run Claude TUI and Gnome Terminal for everything else. The reason is that kitty has basically no chrome around the terminal so there is more space for Claude to write its stuff. Furthermore it's got a different icon so I can pick it more easily from the task bar or with Alt-Tab. However it's got no menus and it takes a "man kitty" to learn how to use it (a /s to myself, I used to read the man pages of everything.) Gnome Terminal has menus and dialogs and that makes it more discoverable and easier to configure. I am using it for bash.
  • shevy-java4 minutes ago
    For some strange reason I kind of settled on tabby. Also as an alternative on Linux (though I tend to use KDE konsole more there).

    Kitty has some nice ideas, but I don't know ... I am getting lazy, so tabby works for my use cases on Windows (mostly just a fancypants wrapper over cmd.exe really; I don't even use powershell anymore, ruby or crystal cover all my scripting needs, including the assumption of OOP in shells).

  • solyinan hour ago
    > Variable font support

    Okay, that's pretty cool. How does it handle spacing though? Do the columns in ls/top/etc still line up?

    • kzrdudean hour ago
      Variable fonts are not necessarily non-monospace. It's about one font file for regular to bold weight and so on.
  • Systemerror7A692 hours ago
    Oh wow, I did not expect not only that many interesting changes, but also that many which seem actually specifically useful to me - very cool to read!

    I love kitty, have used it for a long while now and pretty happy, except for that one thing about ssh xterm - but even that is mostly minor.

    Really cool to see such active development of an already perfectly capable and working software.

    • xnickb2 hours ago
      I've had so many issues with SSH that I ended up ghosttying kitty.
    • birdsongs2 hours ago
      I have the same SSH qualms. I still use it because there's not much better for what I need.
      • Systemerror7A69an hour ago
        I believe I got rid of most of the issues with some .ssh setting which simply uses the normal xterm I believe. I can't check right at this moment, but apparently, simply using xterm and not the xterm-xkitty or what it's called does not actually make much problems when ssh-ing into a machine - not in my case at least.

        It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.

  • isqueiros3 hours ago
    To someone uninformed, how does this compare to Ghostty?
    • sumedh2 hours ago
      Ghostty UX feels more polished compared to Kitty. I tried Kitty for a while but just did not like the default UX.
      • zaphirplane2 hours ago
        The default theme / fonts / colors are a lot more esthetically pleasing combination, that’s likely why you think it’s more polished ?

        I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts

        • asdfsa3215 minutes ago
          To the point that Ghosty and all other new terms are just catching up with kitty. Ghosty is celebware and will likely die away once the author loses interest, despite the flame.
    • azuanrban hour ago
      UI-wise, I kinda like Ghostty more. It feels slightly more polished. However, I've moved to Kitty mainly because of its native session support. The only way to have sessions in Ghostty is through a multiplexer, which I'm not a fan of anymore.
    • ArchD2 hours ago
      Kitty renders some icons badly but ghostty doesn't. In a nutshell, kitty takes some rendering shortcuts that cause the bad rendering:

      https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/docs/faq.rst...

      People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.

      • jcgl23 minutes ago
        I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as Kitty "taking rendering shortcuts." Is this what you're referring to?

        > Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.

    • crossroadsguy2 hours ago
      A significant differenciator is the dev/maintainer I'd say. No, really, hear me out :) I'd start with: this goes for almost any FOSS tool, not just this. Not saying one is good, one is not – but user choices, user feedback, interactions, deisgn goals/choices get affected (and sometimes influence) a lot based on how a dev/maintainer looks at their product and humans who use, or would use, their product – or contribute for that matter.
      • dagurpan hour ago
        so which one do you use and why?
    • TheRoque2 hours ago
      I haven't try Ghostty, but what I like about kitty is that it's performant, easy to customize (often it's just one line to add and you get that new feature you want), I like their defaults for tabs, layouts. It's not overwhelming but not too minimal either. I just find it's a sweet spot. I also somehow like the personality of the maintainer which seem to have a nice vision for the project. My major gripe is that it's not available on windows, but anyways I rarely use microslop products nowadays.
      • paaloeye2 hours ago
        AFAIK, Ghostty is as performant. At least, on macOS. I used both and didn't see much difference. Decided to go with Ghostty as it feels more native than Kitty.
        • TheRoque31 minutes ago
          Yeah from what I've seen Ghostty is slightly more performant but they are both very performant.
        • mstaoruan hour ago
          How does a non-performant terminal look? I don't think I've even seen one.

          Serious question.

          • TheRoque28 minutes ago
            Print a massive log file in kitty/ghostty, and another one with you default terminal, and you'll see a massive difference in how fast the log is printed out. Well to be honest it's just comfort, I can't claim it makes a difference in actual productivity, for me the real benefits of kitty are just the terminal multiplexer-ish capabilities (panes, sessions), other rendering niceties like adjusting the font, or having smooth scroll, sensible default shortcuts. But the actual "performance" e.g. input lag or rendering lag, I don't think it's that important.
          • XYen0n38 minutes ago
            I have previously seen programs run much more slowly when launched from the built-in terminal in a JetBrains IDE because log output was blocked.
          • devsda34 minutes ago
            iterm2. When there's heavy logging, I've seen it lag. Doesn't feel as snappy as Kitty.
    • flohofwoe2 hours ago
      Very similar, about the only difference from user perspective is that Kitty has a slight content 'wobble' on macOS when resizing the window (this typically happens when the content is rendered via an MTKView or CAMetalLayer and its parent view's 'layerContentsPlacement' isn't anchored to one side during window resizing). That would be trivial to fix though.

      PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).

      TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.

      Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

      • devsda18 minutes ago
        > Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows

        Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D

      • darkwater2 hours ago
        > Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

        This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".

        • flohofwoe2 hours ago
          Maybe, but it reminds me of the bad old days when Microsoft called their applications 'cross-platform', and then they just meant different flavours of Windows ;)
          • darkwater2 minutes ago
            I mean, I share the sentiment, and IMO they should support at least the BSDs (there are official FreeBSD ports for both Kitty and Ghostty but no mentions of them in both websites)
      • paaloeye2 hours ago
        Proper Windows support is not easy to archive. Plus with Windows Terminal being good enough and open-source, there isn't much incentive to support it.
        • flohofwoe2 hours ago
          Windows Terminal doesn't support Kitty Graphics Protocol (yet?: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389).

          That's the one thing I always check first in a terminal because I have this pet project to run emulators in a terminal ;)

          https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty

          (works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)

          • paaloeyean hour ago
            Honestly, as fun as it is using KGP, I don't consider it critical for any real use cases.

            If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.

    • cumshitpiss2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • kvlxan hour ago
    Can someone give me a use case of where terminal shaders are providing functionality, rather than eye candy? I mean I love my retro crt look, but there has to be a better reason to have shaders on a term
    • hcalan hour ago
      I use a cursor following shader. It is subtle, but i feel like it draws your eye to where ever the input cursor lands. I train users on a tui application, and it seems to help them as well.
  • a-french-anon2 hours ago
    Just a PSA for people who don't know and have a "normal" DPI monitor: bitmap fonts are intentionally not supported by Kitty.
  • jfsebastian2 hours ago
    Kitty is my go-to for the Linux desktop. I discovered it in an early stage and really liked it from the beginning. It’s great to see that the project continues to be developed so vigorously.
  • Milpotelan hour ago
    In case you don't want a terminal to mess with (or manage) windows, you can disable at least the key bindings:

    enabled_layouts fat

    map kitty_mod+l no_op

    map kitty_mod+enter no_op

    # disable open/close

    map kitty_mod+n no_op

    map kitty_mod+w no_op

  • darkwater2 hours ago
    Automated session restore might make me go back to Kitty from Ghostty.
  • linksbroan hour ago
    woah, those custom shaders (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/custom-shaders/) are sick! ghostty is great, but it's missing that... spirit, that kitty seems to be bringing!

    gz on the release

  • TheRoque2 hours ago
    Nice. I love kitty. But somehow I just realized I'm stuck in 0.47 even though I'm on Fedora, it's like 6 months old. Excited to try the automated session restore.
  • 21 minutes ago
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  • janalsncm2 hours ago
    > Restore after logout

    Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.

  • omegaSigma953 hours ago
    Tbh the quick access terminal stuff in this release is what I wanted three years ago when I wrote my own wrapper
  • krautburglaran hour ago
    Apparently RedHat killed X11 so Kovid could go re-implement it on top of VT220. Ugh.
  • miroljub2 hours ago
    It doesn't work on Windows. What are your favorite Windows alternatives?
    • mellosouls2 hours ago
      Windows Terminal. I used to use things like Kitty but don't see a need these days.
      • tappaseater2 hours ago
        Windows Terminal is surprisingly outstanding.
    • incognito12426 minutes ago
      My favorite Windows alternative is Linux, specifically Manjaro
    • chii2 hours ago
      It's nowhere as featureful as kitty, but i've been using cmder and it's good enough a replacement for the default windows terminal for daily use. But if you use powershell, i m not sure what a good replacement is (but it does work in cmder iirc).

      https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.

      • LelouBil12 minutes ago
        Honestly you don't need ConEmu (the terminal emulator part of cmder) anymore with the new Windows Terminal
    • fernandotakaian hour ago
      i use alacritty on every single OS and i absolutely love it.
    • antihero2 hours ago
      Does GhosTTY work on windows?
      • rmunnan hour ago
        Not yet, but there are several projects that exist to build it for Windows: https://wintty.io/ describes itself as "A native Windows terminal built on the Ghostty core" (i.e., wrapping libghostty in a Windows application), and is probably the one I'd start with. There's also https://noctty.com/ which has taken a similar approach.

        Both are clearly LLM-assisted projects, but https://noctty.com/ has a very Claude-esque front page whereas https://wintty.io/ doesn't set off my LLM detectors nearly as badly. However, Wintty's download page says "Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself" so if you decide you don't like that business model then you may wish to try Noctty, which does have prebuilt binaries.

        NOTE: I have not spent any amount of time with either of those, so I can't give personal recommendations either for or against either.

  • HasanGilani3 hours ago
    Looks fun
  • Biganonan hour ago
    [flagged]
  • akshit-bansal11an hour ago
    [flagged]
  • 0dayman2 hours ago
    [dead]