this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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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?).
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.
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 !
I recently switched from alacritty to ghostty as I wanted image support as ghostty implements the kitty protocol for it. Ghostty seems as fast as alacrity to me, but with better support. It even has a tmux type replacement, although I haven't used it as I don't need it with sway doing that for me.
Why not just use kitty? Just curious.
Its a bit slower than Alacritty for my use case, not massively enough, but enough to put me off. The extra functionality such as its TMUX stuff I just do not need. I think if you want a more fully featured terminal, particularly if you do a lot of code writing in the terminal, then I would pick Kitty.
I only really do quick remote editing in the console so its not important for me, and I do not want TMUX as I use a tiling WM. Terminal launch speed is particularly important to me because of this.
I haven't tried foot yet, that is meant to be good for wayland and as I use Sway it might be better fit. I would need to get frustrated with Ghostty before I could be bothered to switch, which is what happened to me with Alacritty over image support, shallow as that sounds.
Ghostty is fast? It takes like 2 full seconds to open and I'm not even exaggerating. Kitty, Alacritty and foot take only a few microseconds to launch. I feel the same in regards to Alacritty, I'd use it as default if it had image support. For now I'm using foot.
Something wrong there, Ghostty is just as quick for me. Are you using an older PC?
Both load for me in milliseconds, even with fastfetch stuck in my startup.
Don't know about old but definitely not slow. My PC has a ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060. All terminals have a fast startup time except for Ghostty.
Yeah thats what I would call old now, lol.
There is 100% something wrong with your Ghostty.
Heres a shitty gif I made to show you how fast Ghostty, Alacritty and Konsole is on my PC, all way less than a second and I am running a ton of background crap including different 4k animated wallpapers. Gif
That's not old, definitely not for a terminal atleast.
Its six years old, that's starting to get on a bit now for a processor that was never anywhere near top of the line from AMD when it was new.
I think if you are trying to bling our your desktop and not expecting it to impact performance from an older, less powerful setup then generally speaking you are going to have a bad time. You should be pitching your desktop experience based on what your hardware can handle, there are plenty of terminal options available depending on what you need, just like there are plenty of WM/DMs if you have a lower spec machine.
Having said that, it was pretty damn obvious that there something wrong with ghostty on their setup, and its misleading to say that ghostly is just bad because of that.
It's a terminal. If it's not good enough for 3600 maybe it's just not good. I don't have 3600 btw.
Probably, it might be a on off issue.
Ive said repeatedly that its certain to be an issue with their setup I have even provided proof that its not typical.
Its just a terminal applies to pretty much every type of application. There are lightweight WM, text editors, terminals, etc. etc. for a reason.
I can run my current setup with its 2 different animated 4k wallpapers and all the over shit I have running on my old 4800u that is only slightly slower and it consumes an insane amount of CPU at idle. Just because you can does not mean you should.
Images in the terminal? At that point you're just reinventing the GUI.
How am I supposed to get previews working in Yazi then? It's not 1969 anymore. If you don't like it stay on tty.
I just don't see the advantage of shoehorning graphics backwards into text interfaces when we've got an entire integrated graphical desktop.
It's very convenient for terminal based file managers. I use it to preview my wallpapers images and then i use a keybind to set it as the wallpaper for my window manager. I also recently started using rmpc, an mpd client that can display album art.
you are aware that TUI has been a standard thing for ages, right? wanting GUI features inside a terminal isn't new and i'm not sure if you had a point with this comment other than trying to dunk on them..
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.
Kitty can do multiplexing over ssh as well. If you have kitty installed on the remote, you can use Kitty's builtin ssh wrapper and get a lot of useful features.
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/#opt-kitten-ssh.forward_remote_control
Don't tend to have a terminal emulator of any kind installed on remote boxes. They're headless.
I generally don't either, but I do install one when using a terminal that has multiplexing. The ssh multiplexing daemon is part of the kitty binary, so it needs to be installed to work. Not really different than installing Tmux on one.
with kitty you can open a new terminal session that sets it's cwd to the remote directory of the server you're ssh'd into. Honestly the only thing I can think of that termux can do that kitty can't is saving sessions
& abduco can work if you only need attach/detach
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 !