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.
Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.
Works amazingly well.
Looks amazingly bad.
piokoch 20 minutes ago [-]
Frankly? Who care. Napster had even worst GUI, yet it has become popular as it just did the job people wanted.
rithdmc 13 minutes ago [-]
Did Napster have many competitors at the time?
vconnor 1 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.
trvz 1 hours ago [-]
It's tastelessly designed.
mattkevan 1 hours ago [-]
It’s like UI outsider art. The Shaggs [1] of interface design. Can’t decide whether it’s hideous or wonderful.
Easy to tear down people and ideas, hard to build.
Put forward your vision
asdfsa32 52 minutes ago [-]
Easy to demand in return for free feedback.
shaky-carrousel 53 minutes ago [-]
Tools aren't meant to be licked.
Onavo 49 minutes 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.
lowdude 36 minutes 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
petepete 2 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.
vidarh 36 minutes 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.
solyin 47 minutes 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?
kzrdude 43 minutes ago [-]
Variable fonts are not necessarily non-monospace. It's about one font file for regular to bold weight and so on.
kvlx 20 minutes 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
hcal 13 minutes 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.
Milpotel 22 minutes 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
Systemerror7A69 1 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.
xnickb 58 minutes ago [-]
I've had so many issues with SSH that I ended up ghosttying kitty.
birdsongs 1 hours ago [-]
I have the same SSH qualms. I still use it because there's not much better for what I need.
Systemerror7A69 34 minutes 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.
a-french-anon 1 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.
isqueiros 2 hours ago [-]
To someone uninformed, how does this compare to Ghostty?
sumedh 1 hours ago [-]
Ghostty UX feels more polished compared to Kitty. I tried Kitty for a while but just did not like the default UX.
zaphirplane 58 minutes 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
azuanrb 23 minutes 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.
ArchD 1 hours ago [-]
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.
People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.
crossroadsguy 1 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.
dagurp 32 minutes ago [-]
so which one do you use and why?
TheRoque 2 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.
paaloeye 1 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.
mstaoru 5 minutes ago [-]
How does a non-performant terminal look? I don't think I've even seen one.
Serious question.
flohofwoe 2 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).
darkwater 1 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".
flohofwoe 1 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 ;)
paaloeye 1 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.
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.
TheRoque 2 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.
darkwater 1 hours ago [-]
Automated session restore might make me go back to Kitty from Ghostty.
janalsncm 2 hours ago [-]
> Restore after logout
Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.
omegaSigma95 2 hours ago [-]
Tbh the quick access terminal stuff in this release is what I wanted three years ago when I wrote my own wrapper
krautburglar 46 minutes ago [-]
Apparently RedHat killed X11 so Kovid could go re-implement it on top of VT220. Ugh.
miroljub 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't work on Windows. What are your favorite Windows alternatives?
mellosouls 1 hours ago [-]
Windows Terminal. I used to use things like Kitty but don't see a need these days.
tappaseater 56 minutes ago [-]
Windows Terminal is surprisingly outstanding.
chii 59 minutes 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.
fernandotakai 9 minutes ago [-]
i use alacritty on every single OS and i absolutely love it.
antihero 57 minutes ago [-]
Does GhosTTY work on windows?
rmunn 32 minutes 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.
HasanGilani 2 hours ago [-]
Looks fun
Biganon 22 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
akshit-bansal11 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
0dayman 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 10:55:51 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
What a legend.
Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.
Works amazingly well.
Looks amazingly bad.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs
Presenting... MultiPSK!
https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MPSK-Fig1...
https://arngren.net/
Put forward your vision
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.
Okay, that's pretty cool. How does it handle spacing though? Do the columns in ls/top/etc still line up?
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
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.
It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.
I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts
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.
Serious question.
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).
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".
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)
If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.
gz on the release
Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.
https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.
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.