Alacritty makes claims about throughput, which is different than latency, and then uses the word "fast" which can be confused to mean either or both. Alacritty's benchmarks are based on how much text it can process being output to the terminal per second, which it is much better at than most terminals. However separately I think it might be true that kitty also has better throughput, while having better latency and many more features, this is just based on talking to a friend though I haven't tested this.

Sadly, alacritty feels like such a waste of effort. The input lag is pretty bad, and text processing performance is a non-issue with most terminals. I've used xterm for years and never felt it was too slow at that.

Latency makes much more difference in how fast a terminal feels. This is where kitty does a fantastic job, even letting me trade some CPU cycles for really low latency with its options. I can strongly recommend it to anyone who values low latency.

I love it, I use it daily on Fedora and MacOS and is the easiest to configure and fastest terminal I've used so far (previously my main terminal was urxvt in daemon mode, a feature I still hope to see in Alacritty).

Christian Duerr and friends are doing a great job, please continue to work on it.

alacritty still has the best font handling/rendering from my comparisons, though kitty's latency is very noticeably better

alacritty is actually pretty bad at font rendering quality, at least on macos, it looks worst in comparison to all terminal i've tried https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/486

Oh interesting. On Linux it's clearly better than kitty: https://i.imgur.com/fzAPhlN.png

Last time I checked it also had the best unicode handling too, in terms of reliably falling back to some other font for missing codepoints and getting the display of oversized characters right.

It's not immediately obvious which terminal is which. I feel like the text is sharper and, as a result, more readable in the right window, not sure if that agrees or disagrees with your thoughts

The right one is kitty. Look how the italic characters have uneven spacing, eg. the 'l' in 'bold', and some of them are chopped off, for example 'M'. Look how the percent sign on the bottom looks like it's been stretched and the circles aren't the same.

The right hand one is sharper but I have my freetype tuned to look like the left one, which looks the same as every other application on my PC. kitty is doing something completely different and incorrect.

What are the low-latency configuration options you mention?

EDIT: Actually, I use a Bluetooth keyboard, so it's probably moot.

'repaint_delay' and 'input_delay' - there are explanations of each in the default config file

Throughput used to be a problem (looking at you, Hype), but the differences have become smaller as everyone upped the9r game.

This is obviously subjective to some degree. But I used to frequently get annoyed at various terminals until two or so years ago, and have just forgotten about the issue since.

3 years old article [1] on a 3 year old software that gets daily commits. Is it really relevant?

[1] there's no date, had to check Internet Archive, and they refer to 3 years old OSes

edit: I mean, so much has changed that the performance could easily be way better or way worse, I don't think it's representative anymore (usuful for future benchmarks, sure, but relevant not so much)

Except that, like they say, the OP article from this month confirms that nothing has changed