I chose Kitty cause of the name and I have never looked at anything else.
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Linux
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Another happy Kitty user here!
I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.
Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.
Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.
I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.
I use yakuake (or guake if I still used gnome), I love having a consitent terminal slide down the screen every time I press a shortcut, especially if it's supplememtary to what I'm doing in the graphical shell.
And I love the theming options such as transparency. I fell in love with Yakuake a loooong time ago and still love it ! Autohide on outside click and multiple tabbed terminals in the same super easy access window.
I switched from terminator to alacritty a while back. Moved to kitty a few months until a bug was fixed. I do try out new terminals occasionally, but nothing feels as nice as alacritty to me so i stay.
Use whatever you like. You know your needs better than anybody else. As for me, I like Konsole and I will stick to that.
Multiple GNOME terminals in one window!
Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.
terminator sounds great. never heard of it. i did try ghostty, but i can't help myself opening xfce terminal. muscle memory.
Yeah it's great I have a hot key super + Enter to open terminator so the mussle memory doesn't change if I change terminals
Hmm you interested me
Eh, why would you? They're fancy looking but if what you use works for you that's about it.
Is there a reason to change? I use foot terminal, have also used Alacritty and Kitty previously.
What's its advantages over Terminator? Does it have any?
GPU-accelerated, likely faster and less mem usage (Python vs Zig), and image rendering.
I'm no connoisseur, but I just want the same feel as I had back in the 90s. No terminal emulator, straight up tty with crisp VGA ROM fonts at some hacky SuperVGA resolution. Before the virtual framebuffer that basically every computer today uses for tty.
Konsole, gnome-terminal and ghostty can all be made to feel right to me. I'm giving ghostty a spin, and I like how it supports custom shaders so I can make it feel even more like home.
I loved terminator but after learning tmux I just don't really see much point in the main feature. I use xfce4-terminal on i3 these days.
"Am I just an old man..."
-Lord Nikon
I definitely am not getting old, nor am I Zero Cool
Lol zerocool is around here too. I have him tagged it's always fun when we meet in a thread.
Afaik terminator is unmaintained but some people still use it. I've heard of Tilix as a good alternative but can't tell you if that's the case as I haven't used either. I change terminals only if there's a feature my current one doesn't have.
I used alacritty (because that's what came with the distro I used, ArcoLinux) until I switched to Wayland where alacritty font scaling was inconsistent across Xorg and Wayland sessions (and I was still switching between the two). So I went to kitty, until I was convinced to switch to foot because it seemed to open faster so I went to it. Then I switched to COSMIC which doesn't let me remove window decorations server-side and neither kitty nor foot supported their removal client side, so I switched to alacritty which did.
I will switch to COSMIC terminal for convenience (as I use COSMIC) when they fix their font rendering (it's like old Alacritty, only that modern Alacritty has fixed it but cosmic-term still hasn't).
Prefer baratty
Edit: baratty -> bara tiddy
This is a very good joke
I just use konsole. It comes with plasma and is more than good enough for me.
Ditto, this and Yakuake, which is great at keeping it out of the way until I need it.
Yup, Konsole is good enough.
Yes, Team Konsole!
Konsole is great! Only complaint I have is its too complicated to change the text color scheme. But I'll manage. Still beats everything else I've tried.
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I must be older and even more out of touch than you are, as I only use the default Terminal that came with my distro and I had to do a search to check what were Ghostty and Terminator (I know about the movie, obviously, but I'm also old enough to have been watching it in theatre the year it was first released ;)
Ghostty is the new kid, Terminator has been around since 2008 it seems. I don't use it for 6 years now.
I’m like a generation younger than you at least and I’m on the default terminal and tmux train, so I’m saying you’re not out of touch.
I'm an old man. I don't get the appeal of a terminal with hardware acceleration and all that fancy stuff. I use what the distro/DE came with.
Evidently I'm similarly old, but a lot of the TUI apps replacing old standards look better.
Whatever wezterm uses to render ligatures has made editing quite pleasant, it doesn't eat random control characters either which I found insufferable in a few that ship with DEs. Its still miles better than the cart, YMMV depending on what you use it for.
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I'd like to think there's a difference between "keeping up with the times" and chasing whatever new thing gets advertised.
Unless you're really into number chasing with benchmarks then just keep using whatever you like until something YOU find better comes along.
Also I'm GenZ and just use whatever comes with the DE, it's not an old person thing shakes fist.
I have never heard of terminator.
On my Mac, I use Retroterm because emulates Old CRT screens - with scan lines and ghosting and stuff .
Does nothing , crashes sometimes, but is Lots of fun if you’re the guy that remembers floppies.
theres a cool preset called "futuristic" on the linux version (cool retro term) -with a bit of tweaking you can make it look like a terminal from the alien franchise
Ooh didn't know that...
(rushes off to try it)
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