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.

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.

How does a non-performant terminal look? I don't think I've even seen one.

Serious question.

I have previously seen programs run much more slowly when launched from the built-in terminal in a JetBrains IDE because log output was blocked.

iterm2. When there's heavy logging, I've seen it lag. Doesn't feel as snappy as Kitty.

Print a massive log file in kitty/ghostty, and another one with you default terminal, and you'll see a massive difference in how fast the log is printed out. Well to be honest it's just comfort, I can't claim it makes a difference in actual productivity, for me the real benefits of kitty are just the terminal multiplexer-ish capabilities (panes, sessions), other rendering niceties like adjusting the font, or having smooth scroll, sensible default shortcuts. But the actual "performance" e.g. input lag or rendering lag, I don't think it's that important.

A snappy terminal doesn't prevent you from seeing half-filled screens. Flicker can occur when you write line-by-line. That happened in a recent TUI application I wrote. Using synchronized update mode solved the problem.

I frequently compile big software projects, using fast multi-core CPUs, like AMD 9950X, with which the compilation itself is really fast.

Such compilations produce a ton of text messages. With any classic terminal, the text rendering in the terminal window becomes a bottleneck, slowing down the compilation very noticeably.

With modern terminals that use GPU text rendering, like ghostty and kitty, compilations are done much faster.

To see the difference between a slow terminal emulator, like you probably use, and a fast terminal emulator, you can do a "cat" from a text file of a few megabytes, and you will see the speed difference.

Yeah from what I've seen Ghostty is slightly more performant but they are both very performant.

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 it's parent view's 'layerContentsPlacement' isn't anchored to one side during window resizing.

> 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".

Maybe, but it reminds me of the bad old days when Microsoft talked called their applications 'cross-platform', and then they just meant different flavours of Windows ;)

I mean, I share the sentiment, and IMO they should support at least the BSD (there are official FreeBSD ports for both Kitty and Ghostty but no mentions of them in both websites)

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.

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

(works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)

Honestly, as fun as it is using KGP, I don't consider it critical for any real use cases.

If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.

I'm thinking of TUI-based messaging applications, where you would rather see the actual image than a placeholder like "[Image #1]". Well I admit I'm a TUI person, too lazy to grab my mouse.

> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows

Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D

And yet Windows Terminal is hardware accelerated and is two years older than GhosTTY 2019 vs 2021)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/

Tbf, 'hardware accelerated' doesn't mean much when your text renderer is slow (which apparently seems to have been fixed after the 'Muratori drama': https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2022/02/07/windows...)

Same caveats apply to Kitty author’s other app Calibre (ebook manager)

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

[delayed]

To the point that Ghosty and all other new terms are just catching up with kitty. Ghosty is celebware and will likely die away once the author loses interest, despite the flame.

hey, on X I read that MH has a lot of collaborators working on it (when making fun of Anti-AI stances) - looked at the repo: <5 people <5% of commits.

[delayed]

so which one do you use and why?

[delayed]

I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as Kitty "taking rendering shortcuts." Is this what you're referring to?

> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.

[delayed]

I mean, ultimately more or less agree with you, in that software should work well for the user and do what the user wants. This is a case of this not happening. So, all things being equal, it's bad.

But things aren't all equal--there are tradeoffs at play. Kitty's choice to treat monospace fonts as actually monospaced may not fit everyone, but it's a valid decision in this design space.

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.