Yet another Hacker News

89 points porridgeraisin 1 hour ago 37 comments

HasanGilani 1 hour ago | parent

Looks fun

petepete 1 hour ago | parent

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.

isqueiros 1 hour ago | parent

To someone uninformed, how does this compare to Ghostty?

TheRoque 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

paaloeye 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

flohofwoe 49 minutes ago | parent

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).

darkwater 20 minutes ago | parent

> 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".

flohofwoe 19 minutes ago | parent

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 ;)

paaloeye 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

flohofwoe 5 minutes ago | parent

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

sumedh 38 minutes ago | parent

Ghostty UX feels more polished compared to Kitty. I tried Kitty for a while but just did not like the default UX.

zaphirplane 10 minutes ago | parent

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

crossroadsguy 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

ArchD 14 minutes ago | parent

When I was setting up Hyprland a few months ago, I chose ghostty because kitty rendered some icons badly. I think it was the Nerd Font. 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.

omegaSigma95 1 hour ago | parent

Tbh the quick access terminal stuff in this release is what I wanted three years ago when I wrote my own wrapper

TheRoque 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

jfsebastian 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

janalsncm 42 minutes ago | parent

> Restore after logout

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

Systemerror7A69 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

birdsongs 24 minutes ago | parent

I have the same SSH qualms. I still use it because there's not much better for what I need.

xnickb 10 minutes ago | parent

I've had so many issues with SSH that I ended up ghosttying kitty.

anonymous_i 39 minutes ago | parent

I recognized him name from Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/about

What a legend.

vconnor 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

trvz 27 minutes ago | parent

It's tastelessly designed.

zaphirplane 15 minutes ago | parent

Easy to tear down people and ideas, hard to build.

Put forward your vision

mattkevan 14 minutes ago | parent

It’s like UI outsider art. The Shaggs [1] of interface design. Can’t decide whether it’s hideous or wonderful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

shaky-carrousel 5 minutes ago | parent

Tools aren't meant to be licked.

miroljub 36 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't work on Windows. What are your favorite Windows alternatives?

mellosouls 31 minutes ago | parent

Windows Terminal. I used to use things like Kitty but don't see a need these days.

tappaseater 8 minutes ago | parent

Windows Terminal is surprisingly outstanding.

chii 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

antihero 9 minutes ago | parent

Does GhosTTY work on windows?

a-french-anon 23 minutes ago | parent

Just a PSA for people who don't know and have a "normal" DPI monitor: bitmap fonts are intentionally not supported by Kitty.

darkwater 20 minutes ago | parent

Automated session restore might make me go back to Kitty from Ghostty.