Goyal goated as always
Kovid GOATal
Kitty is probably the best terminal emulator I’ve ever tried out… It even made me drop Tmux as multiplexer on my stupid Mac !
I only have basic use case right now, nothing complex but customization seems way above others.
The full OSC52 integration with micro for copy/past over SSH and taking up the terminal clipboard was also a game changer (nearly dropped micro because of this…)
I only scratched the surface and have only basic usage and still I can’t believe one single person is behind this project (I think?).
As a non-user of kitty, why did it make you drop tmux? Don’t they do different jobs?
Kitty has multiplexing built in so it can also replace a lot of what tmux does (unless you’re using tmux over ssh)
That exception is my primary use case for tmux, so that explains it.
Tmux has probably some specific features Kitty won’t do as good as a native multiplexer? (sorry I’m not the right person to ask this question :s) but It has the features I’m looking for without the need to install one.
It was quite cumbersome to configure a terminal + a multiplexer on MacOS to behave how I liked it. Kitty solved this issue while being fast, simple and a lot of customization in one single app.
One feature that was really important, copy/past over SSH with Micro which involved quite a hacky thing with iTerm2 + Tmux.Also being able to split my windows, create tabs…
But as I said I have only basic use cases and can’t really say If Kitty’s multiplexing features are on par with Tmux. However, during my web search I read about a lot of people far more knowledge than myself who actually switch to kitty from Tmux without regrets !
I like it mainly because of the image protocol and supporting both x11 and wayland. I still have alacritty installed as well because i like how damn fast it is. If alacritty had proper image support i’d probably only be using alacritty, but they are both great terminal emulators.
Images in the terminal? At that point you’re just reinventing the GUI.
Yeah Alacritty was my second pick, but after reading their documentation it seemed more for people accustomed to Vi and the like.
So yeah that’s not something I’m willing to spare some time right now, anyway I’m mostly doing some “sys admin” stuff in my homelab, so simple text editing in a simple terminal is a better fit in my workflow/learning process !
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/8226 shows an example of rendered text.
This is cool! I’m almost more interested in the underline gaps for descenders that got snuck in as a “oh yeah I did this too” feature. That makes underlined text so much easier to read, IMO.
I always wondered if something like this could be possible in the future of terminals. glad to see kitty pushing the envelope! Looking forward to see this used for stuff like markdown rendering. Hoping this gets picked up by other terminals and neovim like the undercurl did.
