Re:Kitty 0.50
by TheRoque on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @04:14AM
(#50363076)
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.
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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.