Kitty Is A Fast And Feature Rich Terminal Emulator

Kitty is a terminal emulator available on Linux and MacOS. It offers GPU acceleration, true color, ligature support, graphics support, tabbing, multiplexing and its own plugin framework. Oh, and it's really fast!
REFERENCED:
► sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
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Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[@kaosfang6907]

We need the two projects to join forces Alakitty lol

[@therealslimaddy]

nice to hear.. but both projects are of different codebase and tech stack..Good one :)

[@PurhanKaushik]

Both projects have different philosophies, alacritty devs are reluctant to add new features while kitty is flooded with features and yet faster than alacritty.

[@kaosfang6907]

@@PurhanKaushik this was a joke lol

[@tokiomutex4148]

@@PurhanKaushik Speed of execution it's not dependant on the size of the program

[@PurhanKaushik]

@@tokiomutex4148 Did I ever say that?

[@zoliky]

Kitty was created by the author of the Calibre e-book manager which is also a top-notch software.

[@yourabumjerome]

Now I have to give it a try, I can't live with out calibre

[@rationalityfirst]

too bad it's written also in python

[@therealslimaddy]

@@rationalityfirst why the hate ??

[@rationalityfirst]

@@therealslimaddy because python is a mess

[@therealslimaddy]

@@rationalityfirst care to explain why ?

[@killermonkey1392]

DT: It may be faster, it may be slower, that really doesn't mean much. Also DT: Alacritty is fast, but Kitty is faster!

[@notuxnobux]

14:27 note that linux may cache the directories and files when you run tree so its faster when you run the same command the second time, in kitty.

[@rochr4]

yes, clean boot, re-test ;)

[@nullpointer6792]

I was thinking this could be possible too. Either way I would say kitty is as fast as Alacrity. GPU acceleration can not be understated.

[@jochenillerhausji]

I ran `tree /` once to populate the cache than I timed it in Alacrity and Kitty. There was no difference on my machine (less than 0.1%).

[@peter2327]

@@rochr4 or have a look into NOCACHE(1) NOCACHE(1) NAME nocache - don't use Linux page cache on given command SYNOPSIS nocache [-n ] command [argument...]

[@11WicToR11]

@` this clearly shows how irrelevant these differences are ...even at tree-ing the whole system the difference between gpu-accelerated and not are really small, 10-20%? I m using alacritty so I m playing devil's advocate here, but I think it doesnt really matter in day to day use ....I was forced to use st for a month and honestly didnt notice (st doesnt use gpu). What actually matters are features (or lack there of). I absolutely love how alacritty config works, how it applies changes to running instances. Features are what actually makes the difference, not fractions of seconds (or few seconds in absurd use cases)

[@tobiasander2741]

In my experience, the point of tabs and splits are very useful when administering lots of servers from a jumpstation that you need to use (at least that's the case where I work)...but then it's ususally not an option to install Kitty so I go with tmux. Thanks for a nice video.

[@arianh]

I really enjoyed watching this video, learned a lot! Thanks, I'm using Kitty because of tab management feature

[@andrewpalm2103]

I've been using Kitty for several months now. Really, just stumbled on it one day and tried it. Works well in Fedora and it's now my default terminal there. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work in Debian Stable (but I didn't try that hard). Thanks for going over some of the features, which I haven't taken the time to explore.

[@TheSulross]

For those not using a tiling window manager (raising hand) this Kitty does indeed look compelling - and I admit I rather like the ability to see images right there in the text terminal. This would be the kind of rendering engine capability that I'd like to see with the Gemini web - text mode sensibilities rendered with ultra high performance but with the ability to render graphics image formats of various kinds

[@nikolainorona8157]

Link clicking with ctrl + shift + e is one of my favorite keyboard friendly kitty features. Kitty diff is also super nice for looking at git commits

[@t1mec0p]

“For looking at git commits” pls elaborate, ty. Curious what it does well.

[@lumberjackstudio7467]

Hey DT ! Lol Just wanted to let you know that you are with Chris Titus the main reason why I'm running linux and dumped windows and proprietary poo as you like to say. From Montreal Quebec thank you and keep up the good work

[@folksurvival]

Chris Titus doesn't know what he's talking about.

[@clouddaemon4828]

what a coincidence, I just switched to Kitty yesterday, mostly for the splitting thing, but also it's blazing fast

[@ad_sidera_virgines]

I just remember 1 week ago you said in a live "my favorite terminal emulator is alacritty but knowing me i'll hop to another one in just a week" You were actually not totally wrong 😅

[@hedgeearthridge6807]

I like that it doesnt come with a weird terminal theme like Alacritty. It's a pain in the ass to just make Alacritty look normal, editing config files (or borking it using that janky theming program for it)

[@calfdindon2353]

Doing tree on root the second time may be faster because of the filesystem cache, having a program that print 10000 lines of random characters should be a better test.

[@robertobautista2171]

You're scaring me, after I just installed kitty, I went to check KZbin, and you just updated this video

[@HectaSpyrit]

@@criticalsoft He knows our thoughts, he walks our minds...

[@matman1975]

Another great video DT, Kitty default.conf at 1000 lines isn't too bad considering squid default.conf has 7980 lines but most is comments as well.

[@auroradraco9974]

Faster than Alacritty, what kind of sorcery is this. Thats the first time I have seen a terminal emulator claim that. This makes me want to try it

[@KutAnimus]

Nothing in this video supports that claim. He didn't even do proper benchmarks.

[@KutAnimus]

@BronzeKaiser Yeah it's not at all conclusive. The original dev of Alacritty did some benchmarks: jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ - but keep in mind that those don't take latency into account.

[@OG900Aero]

@BronzeKaiser No kitty isnt fast. Look your example (time tree /) in my computer: 1. st (suckless aka simple terminal) -> 3.455sec 2. alacritty -> 3.590sec 3. termite -> 5.001sec 4. kitty -> 7.025sec(!) Kitty is the slowest...

[@Gabifuertes]

I started using Kitty the moment I switched to Arch and wanted to display an image on neofetch, lol.

[@Gabifuertes]

And ligatures as another comment suggests. I forgot about that.

[@RP-kr2mg]

​ @Gabifuertes I switched to Kitty from Konsole in Manjaro KDE. The experience has been outstanding compared to competitors.

[@prgnify]

hmmm why do people use neofetch?

[@XMansive]

@@prgnify it's fancy

[@momfor8685]

I love kitty changed from alacritty to it the second i saw it has ligtatures

[@zehph]

This is little controversial I think, I do like ligatures a lot

[@joelchrono]

What are ligatures? I am kinda new on that

[@gotcrazy101]

@@joelchrono Ligatures are special characters that form by combining two other characters, in these case ligatures would only show for aesthetic purposes, like when you have "->", that'll form an arrow, or triple equals would show up like a normal equal sign but with one added line on time instead of showing "===".

[@thallium54]

@@joelchrono Ligature is mostly for programming, for example, if your font supports ligature, when you type

[@ivanf.8489]

Yap, like me. I'll rethink of using alacrity when they finally add ligatures.

[@hakertube]

the way to build extensions (kittens) is a very cool feature in kitty because you only need to know python and this brings to kitty a lot of libs and opportunities i think we will see a lot of cool stuff in the future

[@ulquiorra3504]

Thanks for the video.

[@artygator8167]

That was suggested over reddit. Very cool you made a video about it.

[@0x7f2c]

meow

[@user-ln6bq1gc9t]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@f4T1H21]

Hi Derek! First I want to thank you for videos, enjoying and learning a lot from your content. I'm curious about the terminal color schemes you used in this video, for kitty and alacritty respectively, could you please share them?

[@kellyrunnels5684]

DT, dammit, I just patched st to my liking, giving me a perfect terminal experience, but now I have to go check this out.

[@OG900Aero]

St is much faster than kitty, when try time tree / command

[@sreegowthamjosyula9447]

I have used alacritty with tmux in the past but I recently transitioned to kitty and I am more than impressed. Here to stay! Tmux is in some sense an architectural smell, especially when used only for terminal multiplexing. It is an additional layer on top of the terminal emulator that redirects every character that is ever sent to the terminal... negating in part the speed benefits that the developers of Alacritty and Kitty work so hard to achieve.

[@ardishco]

unfortunately kitty hasnt been so nice for me. Resizing it is very buggy on bspwm on my machine.. I can configure it just fine but it just messes with my workflow

[@sreegowthamjosyula9447]

@@ardishco Have you tried installing the latest version from the website instead of using the ones supplied by distro package managers?

[@TheDuckPox]

I think kitty output was cached whilst alacritty was not. You should try to benchmark it a couple more times. Also, kitty starts up slightly slower on my machine.

[@awolasap4554]

Found kitty a while ago, been loving it ever since.

[@MarcosAG90]

I started using kitty to display images in vifm the easy way and I'm loving it

[@sklorpion]

How?

[@MarcosAG90]

@@sklorpion with a kitten. There is an article in Medium about how to show images in the terminal with kitty.

[@v4ldevrr4m47]

I knew Kitty last year , and yes absolutly I loved it

[@KatzRool]

I love that your channel is DistroTube but even though you check out Distros here and there, you're more or less comfortable staying on what works and hopping programs all the time. It's amazing how often I open up KZbin to find you've once again found a new favourite terminal/wm to customise exactly the same as all your other ones lmao. Keep it up DT.

[@t1mec0p]

I guess he likes to tinker then?

[@jamielambrecht9419]

sold and i'm switched. thanks for the recommendation. on my spacevim, the config is nicely collapsed into sections by default as well. the tab system is good too you can do normal clickable tabs with super+shift+t and close them with super+shift+q

[@t1mec0p]

Never heard of spacevim - this looks glorious! Will check. Favorite features?

[@jorgesol4128]

Hey DT! Could you do a video looking at Privacy and Security OS? Like Whonix, QubesOS, Linux Kadachi or Tails? Really want to hear your opinion ^_^

[@shizeeque]

I use st / kitty / Alacritty and WezTerm for different reasons. st has blazing fast startup time. I have a pretty old rig: Phenom 9550 / 4G DDR2-800 so Alacritty takes about 7 to 10 seconds to start on my machine it's very slow. st takes 2-3 seconds. In terms of rendering Alacritty is considerably faster so when I need a terminal for coding I use Alacritty. Kitty on the other hand has a different font shaping code so fonts look differently (better or worse is a matter of preference). I terms of speed it's slightly faster than Alacritty in both startup time and rendering speed. WezTerm is a marvel! It is implemented in Rust and it's GPU-based similar to Alacritty but it has significantly better font shaping code (I like the way it renders fonts better), it has suport for OTF options like: ligatures on/off, zero with dot or slashed, you can choose it in the config if your font supports it (FiraCode and Adobe Code Pro both do) but the terminal requires to have Xorg Composite option enabled which affects my performance and triggers a bug in nVidia drivers which randomly halts my system. WezTerm supports images too but it uses a different protocol incompatible to kitty. so for modern systems I definitely recommend WezTerm it's a way better terminal than Alacritty even so Alacritty itself is a wonderful one. kitty has heavy python dependencies but it is blazing fast still. You can add an alias icat='/usr/bin/kitty +kitten icat' to save yourself some keystrokes.

[@joshstrawder]

Where are you getting the Star Wars block text art stuff in the terminal??

[@roger0p920]

DT how do you get that logo are art when you atart alacrity or kitty(the six , crunchybag, jango fett) one.

[@machman23]

Nice icat feature love that one

[@marccawood]

2 questions, unrelated to Kitty but from this vid: - What window manager and hotkeys allows that tiling? 17:50 - What app is generating the random ascii art?

[@diegopego1069]

Fantastic tool!

[@TheOPtmal]

I love kitty. Glad its getting more attention

[@kronikpillow]

if i wanted to use kitty in dwm as a scratchpad instead of st? what would be the proper way to lauch it in a 50x20 sized scratchpad?

[@suyogmule3630]

You don't need example config file. Just press ctrl+shift+f2 in kitty. And it'll open confing in your default editor

[@sumitrawat3742]

hey dt can you make a video about setting up your display manager (LightDM)

[@thales-maciel]

having to restart the terminal after changing anything in the config feels like so much pain after using alacritty for a while

[@atemoc]

Yeah. And I noticed it uses a lot more resources and is slower to start up, especially noticeable on hard drives and lower-specs machines

[@t1mec0p]

The docs mention right away (now, at least) that ctrl+shift+f5 reloads from the config, but it’d be nice if it did it automatically imo.

[@whatthehack1589]

One question I have about kitty, how do I enable bold is bright option in kitty?

[@woouinluigh]

I've been using a terminal emulator called wezterm for a while. I like it a lot but haven't seen much people use it. it's kinda similar concept, but the config is written in lua, which might be nice for some

[@007arek]

It takes 277 MB on my machine. Too much for me, but it's look good.

[@atemoc]

I love this terminal, but the font rendering is really weird I use the UbuntuMono Nerd Fonts, and no matter what setting I put, the letters are always rendered weirdly, glued one to the other, and, it's just weird, as of Alacritty, it handles it perfectly fine without tweaking anything [ EDIT ] Fixed it! I just needed to enter the ENTIRE font names and settings, see here : font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font bold_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Bold italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Italic bold_italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Bold ^ This wasn't good What I needed to do is that v font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Regular bold_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Bold italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Italic bold_italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Bold

[@katech6020]

Try this: font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono bold_font auto italic_font auto bold_italic_font auto

[@Anbaraen]

I've noticed this behaviour too and fixed it in the same way.

[@rand0mher0742]

i was about to ask if you made sure it was monospaced. proud of u for figuring it out.

[@GeorgiMinkov]

Tha lack of bitmap fonts in kitty is a no-no for me

[@katech6020]

@@GeorgiMinkov bitmap fonts looks bad everywhere. why you want them?

[@liesdamnlies3372]

Switched from Alacritty to Kitty for ligatures (Alacritty will basically never have ligature support), haven’t looked back.

[@lionwolf]

Hey DT, can you overview finch?

[@PinikRahman]

Kitty is perfect terminal for me.. its fast, shows images, ligatures

[@arvindersingh9863]

I changed text color from the config file , but how can i change bold text color and use different colors etc.

[@celestialadministration]

The best tech enthusiasts channel on KZbin.

[@Noname-wy4wy]

I do use a tiling window manager and I truly need multiplexing terminals with it also. Depends on your needs and what you are doing with your computer I guess :D

[@balmar3]

I'm still on urxvt and couldn't live without some of its perl extensions for keyboard select (using vi-style controls, of course) and keyboard copy / open url's. Can Kitty (or Alacritty) do that?

[@memorysticky7581]

was wondering how did you make your document "folded" thanks.

[@w01dnick]

Hm, I've made this test several times (`time tree /home`, not `/` cause I also have a HDD mounted, so it would be slow) and Kitty got 2-2.3s, and my usual terminal - Konsole - 1.5-2s. So is Konsole faster after all?

[@AriannaEuryaleMusic]

i installed kitty, with Awesome and a pacman theme-bar, looks beautiful

[@copper4eva]

I noticed when you opened and closed alacritty that a small animation occurred. Where did that come from? Picom?

[@DistroTube]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/equ5mKVmot11nKs

[@copper4eva]

@@DistroTube I had no idea there was a picom fork with animations. Very cool.

[@user-georij]

How do you achive those transitions when window opens\closes?

[@hogstudio4819]

It's a picom fork, he has a video about it.

[@somthonphysic6540]

Good video

[@stabby4574]

I noticed latency on both alacritty and doom Emacs. Had to switch back to st terminal. They are fast in terms of throughput but they do have delay while typing. Annoying in vim especially

[@NdxtremePro]

What if you could use images in emacs in Kitty? How hard would it be to implement that, I wonder?

[@GeorgiMinkov]

DT, you could also try foot terminal :)

[@rampus44]

I think I've found my new terminal emulator

[@mke7605]

The startup time on these terminal emulators is really a dealbreaker for me. In my workflow I open and close terminals all the time in DWM. So start time is for me way more important then rendering.

[@mke7605]

Just did a test running "time tree /" in both Kitty and my own st build. The time are virtually the same, multiple runs makes both being fastest in turns, differnce usually within the .1 s. So, at least on my laptop, kitty doesn't seem to be faster than st running this test. I saw that st's output also had colouring while Kitty didn't (this was an unconfigured Kitty). I don't have a big GPU, only the default Intel one, so maybe Kitty cannot make full advantage of the GPU acceleration, but I think the speed of these emulators is a bit overblown. Still have to test Alacritty though, maybe it fares better. BTW, never count the first time as that one takes longer. It seems to build up cache first after which the command is a whole lot faster.

[@Luflosi]

You can use single instance mode to reduce the startup time of new instances: sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/invocation.html#cmdoption-kitty-single-instance

[@driden1987]

Going to install on my work machine (MacBook)

[@jemag]

I was hoping hoping you would go over the real comparison, how does Kitty compare to Alacritty badass vim mode

[@Froggie92]

alacritty doesnt have ligature support, minus a version in the aur thats 2 versions behind

[@daol03]

what is the main difference between kitty vs alacritty?

[@heiah]

what is your tiling window manager though?

[@IvanKekov]

Thanks for your videos. Please consider having timestamps, they really help!

[@michaelcarnevale5620]

if Kitty had the handy window management of Terminator it would appeal to most users imo

[@teddy911]

what is your desktop environment dt? kde? i really like it.

[@folksurvival]

He's not using a desktop environment, he's using xmonad.

[@mzakyr342]

you can reload kitty theme by CTRL-SHIFT-F5

[@davebrowning9290]

I had a problem with the backspace not working right with kitty when using ssh to connect to a Raspberry Pi. I figured out that installing kitty-terminfo on the Raspberry Pi fixed the problem.

[@obsidiansiriusblackheart]

How is the emoji support in kitty?

[@shivamrastogi3154]

Hello @DistoTube, would you please share your tilingManager config file?

[@mhellden]

thanks for the show, finally I have found the worthy successor of urxvt. I have tried them all, but none has stand the tests (alacritty, terminator, xfce4-terminal, st, sakura, qterminal, konsole, lxterminal, terminology, gnome-terminal ... all missing something important).....

[@jeffreyplum5259]

I may use this on my systems with a GPU. I wonder how it work on the Pi, which may not use its GPU well.

[@mkvalor]

Testing with 'tree': The first time you ran it in alacritty, your system cached some of the inode info. Kitty might be faster, but I suspect the caching interfered with the test by making the second run quicker regardless of the terminal used.

[@ruiteng3156]

Agree, the first time to run tree command takes longer time.

[@achillesmunch8450]

I“m using Kitty for some years. I would like to try Alacritty though, but there is one critical thing that Alacritty is missing: Suppor of Ligatures.

[@bendover4728]

I actually like the "bald font"...

[@ahmedahmedx9600]

Hi, what os you are using ??

[@leonardonovara9348]

I hope you make a review about Remind and Wyrd. Remind is old as Vim.

[@coocoobau]

7:03 Ctrl+Shift+F5 to reload config in kitty

[@m3hdim3hdi]

I installed Kitty and i cant find hop to open it can someone help me?

[@heroe1486]

The layout thing could be interesting for macOs/DE users

[@furiousfellow1583]

LOL I've been using kitty for the last 3 months because of the comments on your videos, also how about a video on top distros with a PURPOSE, i can think of arcoLinux that is somewhat of a platform to learn linux or AV-Linux that makes audio production in linux accessible to anyone , those came o mind but i´m sure inside the endless sea of linux distros there are some of them that actually serve a purpose and linux community would be missing them if they were to disappear

[@jujay51]

what is the window manager you are using? i3wm?

[@folksurvival]

Xmonad

[@Xyper1231]

do you have a tutorial as to how we can duplicate your desktop? it looks amazing!!

[@folksurvival]

DTOS

[@TouchedAlot]

I tried it but the scrolling sucks, it only scrolls by line instead of by pixel, which is really annoying when using a touchpad

[@DevanandPA-vq1yj]

Also the `time tree /` is not fair because the first time it is run , tree takes more time. Run it once and then it has the files indexed, and run the tests after that. Here are the results I got : Alacritty : 86796 directories, 1141900 files real 0m6.815s user 0m3.719s sys 0m3.081s Kitty : 86796 directories, 1141736 files real 0m7.737s user 0m3.735s sys 0m3.023s St : 86796 directories, 1142003 files real 0m6.581s user 0m3.617s sys 0m2.954s However , it is worth noting that st was sort of skipping over some content mid-rendering wheras both kitty and alacritty were rendering the tree smoothly throughout. The only difference in "GPU acceleration" is how fast the text is rendered on screen , not how fast the program is run

[@kientran4818]

I don’t know why in the world do we need So many terminal emulators? It’s so confusing to find the right one for oneself. I need a terminal supports true color but still hang on default Apple terminal because i don’t know which one to replace it.

[@folksurvival]

>using Apple

[@myegane49]

I love it

[@atharvakokate6388]

kitty + gruvbox =

[@anantgupta7916]

5:04 him page down 'G' I am a joke to you

[@nevoyu]

4th, totally installing it right now, also apparently openSUSE has the default config elsewhere. turns out openSUSE doesn;t package kitty.conf anywhere, it looks like they point kitty to read .Xresources

[@DistroTube]

I think you'll be impressed with it.

[@nevoyu]

@@DistroTube Mildly, honestly been on opensuse for a while and the distro is proving... frustrating with the changes they make to the packages. I got too used to Fedora/Debian where they dont touch the defaults.

[@user-ln6bq1gc9t]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@blackberry8692]

@@nevoyu Try Arch-based OS such as Manjaro, you are going to love it.

[@nevoyu]

@@DistroTube just thought I'd share still using kitty though I don't use tabs or multiplexing....

[@alexstone691]

alacritty didn't have packages for distro i was using so i used kitty and it's great

[@rand0mher0742]

been using it since i jumped to manjaro about 2 years ago

[@nichohells]

Any way to completely disable italics?, I'm going insane