I'm ditching Alacritty. Here's why

[@cat47]

tl;dr: kitty supports showing images in the terminal while alacritty doesn't

[@Err-G]

And kitty is easier to configure thanks to kittens.

[@stephanbylkov8215]

it does, the documentation of yazi literally says what you need to do in order to use peviews in alacritty (install ueberzug)

[@8ack2Lobby]

lmfao that's it? 😂

[@obestatrovao]

wezterm also can :)

[@Darkstar159]

Man I thought 6 minutes was a short video but somehow even that was an extreme stretch for making such a simple point.

[@hank9th]

I use fish inside of kitty for maximum cat-themed goodness.

[@typecraft_dev]

meow

[@zhongxina728]

catppuccin?

[@s00774]

fish aint posix compliant, id use something else

[@werecynicalwhywolf8700]

@@typecraft_dev Tse-Tung

[@subatomicmolecules]

​@@s00774 honestly, is it really all that important? Ask yourself, why does POSIX compliance matter for an interactive shell? For making/using portable scripts? That's what shebangs are for, /bin/sh or bash and no problems. Instead of using one shell for everything, you can use fish for interactive terminal use, and bash or even dash for scripting (dash is already used instead of bash for sh on Debian based systems). Fish just makes a lot more sense for interactive use imo, and you don't really have to learn a whole new language (it's not like you're using test and if statements on a terminal directly anyway). The only reason I wouldn't use fish is if I already had a working zsh configuration I'd been using for years.

[@CollinWilliams-by5cs]

0:00 I'm calling it: Alacritty -> Kitty for Image support

[@NJ-wb1cz]

I'm calling it GUI

[@pixl_xip]

To be honest I was expecting ligatures.

[@driden1987]

Next video: ditching Kitty for Wezterm. We’ve all done it 😅

[@typecraft_dev]

Haha ok

[@kylekettler]

Been there. It's bound to happen 😅

[@kalvinarts]

Switched this week to wezterm … never going back to alacritty. I considered kitty but the the lua config for wezterm is much more powerful.

[@Vreth6]

I am still on Kitty even after trying wezterm. Both are great tbh, but Kitty felt a little more fitting for someone who is in tmux a lot.

[@hoxefko]

I came to the comments to say exactly the same 😂

[@VoyivodaFTW1]

you've been on fire lately. keep the new videos rolling.

[@typecraft_dev]

Thanks! Will do!

[@keyboard_g]

@@typecraft_devit’s a bot…

[@jeanclaudedusse6176]

Amazing video as always ... now all we need is a video about yazi :D

[@typecraft_dev]

Working on it!

[@rewindyourmind321]

These videos always come out so timely, I just finished my configuring the foot terminal on my Arch machine for the same reason!

[@resofactor]

KZbin popped this up as Recommended Video due to my Linux searches. This is cool to know. Thanks for producing this one. Just Subscribed.

[@halano]

Foot is best terminal : - footclient start in 98 ms - image rendering supported - small memory fingerprint - support emojis - flexible - fast

[@rev4324]

it's nice, but it isn't as fast at rendering as gpu based terminal emulators, like kitty, alacritty or ghostty

[@youdontknowme2508]

​@@rev4324Where have you noticed the performance difference?

[@victorbitencourt9481]

wayland only

[@matejlaskomulej]

@@rev4324 Is wezterm gpu based too? I tested printing out entire home directory file structure with "tree" command in both alacritty and wezterm at the same time and they both finished at precisely the same time as well. GNOME Ubuntu 24.0.4 / Wayland

[@stevemorgandev]

I’ve switched back and forth between these two terminals. Usually a little thing will annoy me enough. I forget exactly why I switched back to alacritty this last time. I just make sure I back up my configs with stow so that I can switch seamlessly when needed.

[@rodelias9378]

Wezterm is the new kid in the block.. Go give it a try!

[@typecraft_dev]

I'll have to check it out!

[@iduran]

How about Wezterm? Also written in Rust and is configured using Lua.

[@AlexNovak]

Also supports image rendering!

[@256k_]

wezterm is the best really.

[@htlin.lizard]

I vote for Wezterm. If you're familiar with configuring Neovim using Lua, using WezTerm will be no problem at all.

[@TokyoXtreme]

Bunch of fine fellas with good taste in terminals in this little thread here.

[@khanra17]

WezTerm is a bloat & a mess

[@GrahamAtDesk]

Great stuff. You prompted me to bite the bullet and Ansible this thing up. 🙂 After decades in GNOME Terminal, I'm looking forward to this. My main motivation for switching was simply to hide the menubar!

[@oglothenerd]

Something that Kitty must add for me to use it instead of Alacritty is the bright bold feature. Essentially, when text is bold, make it use the bright variant of the text color.

[@minecraftpufferfish9066]

I have switched from Alacritty to foot. It's BLAZING fast and it has image support. Kitty has font ligature support, but it's just noticeably slow; foot, on the other hand, opens faster than any other terminal emulator I've ever tried.

[@tonynguyen725]

I agree, been using foot and never looked back

[@SunHail8]

never tried it. is Foot faster than Konsole???

[@minecraftpufferfish9066]

@@SunHail8 yeah, it's significantly faster.

[@vaisakh_km]

i personally Worked with vhyrro to make a latex rendering lib for neovim to use in neorg, which uses kitty terminal graphics protocol.. such a cool protocol to work with (currently it's not used as hologram depricated) though now i switched after 1y to foot terminal as i can feel the lag in kitty, which is much nicer and support images with sixel

[@dv_xl]

Kitty is way faster than for me than most other terminals, although havent tried foot. Wezterm and Alacritty both performed very poorly on my laptop, and I'm not sure why. I'm still using X, maybe that has something to do with it

[@vaisakh_km]

@@dv_xl that's really odd.. i am not sure about wezterm, but alacritty should be performing really well..

[@aquepaique]

I use Kitty instead of wezterm because kitty feels smoother, no laggy when I scroll down. Also, wezterm consumes more ram.

[@DEVDerr]

I like to think that you made the switch, because of my last comment on one of your videos haha :D but seriously - good switch mate! I made the same switch 1 month ago and I'm enjoying kitty so far. Also thanks for that `kittens` tip! I didn't know about that and it's amazing

[@typecraft_dev]

Thanks! 😁

[@amarug]

Kitty is the best for a desktop with a gpu, but if you are using a laptop mostly on battery, kitty isnt the best, its resource hungry. I actually just use the xfce4 term, it opens immediately and doesnt hog resources. Kitty takes literally like 1.5 seconds to open (which for a terminal is an eternity) and hogs ram, cpu etc.

[@darkarie]

did you try foot? it uses the cpu and its really nice

[@riufq]

For tldw: It because kitty terminal have image preview, but Alacrity not.

[@davindersiwal1180]

Thanks for the video, kitty also supports pdf file view as well as scrolling

[@leopoId]

It's maintainer is just rude. I'll just keep using alacritty.

[@fredartchannel7508]

lol

[@Varadiio]

For others like me coming in late (using Wezterm) that might not know, see kitty github issue 2481. All I found immediately, but that's enough for me to avoid it. (the issue, but especially the response, that I interpret as hostility toward any other viewpoint) There are bound to be more.

[@MuhammadSalman7236]

I've seen more people saying alacritty devs are tards than people saying kitty devs are tards.

btw, wezterm also supports image preview and is config file is written in lua :D

[@mischavandenburg]

Great video! Been on Alacritty for almost 3 years now and I'm not going anywhere. Portability and minimalism win it for me

[@dgames218]

typecraft, Do you think you could make a video comparing Kitty, wezterm and contour? It would be great to hear your opinion

[@typecraft_dev]

I think I’ll have to!

[@minhtienao2306]

I also changed to kitty because I want to use yazi too, basically still like the simplicity of alacrity's setting more but kitty is okay though

[@wojciech-kulik]

Good timing nerd, I've just switched to Kitty & Yazi around 3 days ago, hahaha :D. Amazing tools!

[@rizakhan1002]

Dude your vids are killer. Great content and well paced. Thanks for sharing.

[@typecraft_dev]

Thank you! I always appreciate these comments

[@sethback]

Ngl, thought you were gonna jump on Ghostty terminal (closed beta for now) from Mitchell H :D

[@typecraft_dev]

I just got an invite :)

[@sethback]

@@typecraft_dev next video compare kitty to ghostty :3

[@debajyatidey9468]

You are on the right path. Already ditched kitty for wezterm

[@HaydonRyan]

If alacrity had image and tab support I’d consider switching from kitty, but doesn’t look like that will happen, so happily staying on kitty.

[@ertwro]

I don’t care how much people say kitty is bloated. It has the best image protocol for terminals. In fact I patched ST terminal with the kitty protocol and I didn’t burst into flames. Is the best at the moment. Ps: Rust is amazing for refactoring but just because something is written in rust is no instantaneous win.

[@offerurain8641]

image render is indeed fantastic. But i use kitty mainly for the built in tab, it's really easy to use, i don't need tmux or zellij anymore.

[@joergw]

There is no need to use Nerd Fonts in kitty Kitty allows you to use a second font just for the icons, so you can use any regular (unpatched) font

[@freeyourmind757]

I wonder why don't we have a terminal with command prompt at first line not on the last. You type commands on first line always and see the result below like stack. It's easier to read the results. No need to seek where output starts, it's right below the command prompt.

[@freeyourmind757]

@chrishoppner150 thanks for you reply I've found WARP terminal emulator it does exactly what i described

[@typkrft]

Kitty was my terminal of choice for a long time. Just recently switched to wezterm after dabbling with it for a few years. Configured in lua, used multiple graphics protocols including kitties, and is similarly performant.

[@huljaxful]

I was using kitty but then switched back to alacritty when switching distros basically. Long story short, I didn't know about the themes in kitty. I am not a ricer, just a hopper 😂 but this is pure gold. Thank you for sharing info for us advanced/not advanced users. By the way, I use mint and pop 😮

[@PhysicsLaboratory-cp7eq]

Both terminal on default conf, the alacrity anti aliasing of font looks way good at least on my 720 display. But the actually reason no kitty is, just try to run unimatrix -l e on both terminal. Couldn't get colored emoji work on kitty 😂 no matter what. *yes few color emoji show but to make alacritty show all the color emoji was way way simpler then kitty (still could get it working)

[@user-ek8cd1gg3f]

I also use kitty, mainly because of the extensivility and the ligatures. Alacritty text rendering looks a bit better to me, but kitty is very very good (much better than wezterm). I'm happy with it but the most disappointing thing about kitty is that developing custom kittens is super frustrating because de python API is not documented.

[@user-ek8cd1gg3f]

Extensibility*

[@DGDG0000000]

wow, nice. Thank you for Kitty, and for yazi-fm too.

[@tinylith1603]

My kitty configuration is colorscheme and font and I'm happy with it :D

[@rossvold]

Watching this created live on Twitch was fun. Although I’m surprised you kept in the “meow”’s 😂

[@keyboard_g]

Does Kitty still open network connections and call home without user consent?

[@justronny20]

Loved watching this video being recorded live on yesterday's stream!

[@knotrocket4825]

You should try Foot which also has image support if you like the simplicity of Alacritty and don't mind not having GPU acceleration or X11/MacOS support.

[@geanb.8699]

In my experience, GPU acceleration only results in screen tearing and lag in the terminal. That's why I switched to Foot.

[@arztareef]

you couldve done that with ueberzug protocol which works on all terminal and im pretty sure it works with yazi, it really wasnt necessary and you'll miss the dynamic cursor from alacritty

[@ejiek]

You're correct, Yazi has built-in support for ueberzugpp and it does work in alacritty

[@jozsefk9]

I tried many terminals. Ended up using Alacritty at the end. And still using it now for more than a year I think. Added Zellij to it few months ago, and it's a dream. Except that I don't have image, videos, PDFs... previews in Yazi. But it didn't work for me with Kitty either so no difference. And I already tried Kitty before...

[@jozsefk9]

just got the image previews now in Kitty. Not sure if I will leave Alacritty though.

[@DarthVader11912]

I'm glad the video turned out great 😃

[@typecraft_dev]

Me too! Thanks for being there, was fun!

[@QuebnQ]

currently on kitty and I will only consider switching to alacritty only if they support font ligatures.

[@12px]

you will feel at home when ghostty is publicly available. it has everything and is faster than all of them. I really mean it!

[@QuebnQ]

i've heard of ghostty before, now i'm looking forward for it. Thanks

[@ForeverZer0]

I understand that ligatures are not a trivial thing to implement, but I feel that Alacritty really misses out on a significant user-base by not supporting them.

[@FHorrigan2]

​​@@ForeverZer0why people care so much about ligatures? They look horrible and make code unreadable

[@antiwokehuman]

@@12pxghostty is out. It has all the features i want, but it also takes a long time to launch which to me is a bit disappointing. I use it in my special workspace in hyprland. Another thing i really want is for them to support remembering my splits in linux like it does in mac os

[@PercyGTM]

Yazi's image rendering works with WezTerm and Foot too.

[@typecraft_dev]

oh very cool!

[@samuraijosh1595]

​@@typecraft_devyes the images look high quality in windows wezterm too although western hangs when you do any quick movements while editing heavily for whatever reason

[@NeythEU]

and with alacritty ;-) and every other terminal emulator - you need ueberzugpp and set it as render backend in the yazi config

[@markzuckerbread1865]

yazi is such a goated program fr, no config needed so I can actually use it at work without being obnoxious with configs

[@roberto7102]

I was loving ranger and nerd-nnn but yazi with kitty is amaziiiiiing btw kitty was already my terminal emulator thanks man!

[@ZilverDx]

The problem that I got with kitty is that it has memory leak on mac m1 when using tmux 😢

[@Zwiesel66]

Kitty is great, I have discovered it a few weeks ago

[@amodo80]

i really hated the kitty dev's attitude about which features go in and which won't and especially the way he communicated that. is ANSI-blink now supoprted? is it possible to turn off bold rendering? (most of the times you just want to render text *bright*ly and not bold when the ANSI bold is active due to historical reasons. this was not possible in kitty last time I checked.

[@Babbili]

i'm just using Gnome terminal, it's also GPU accelerated, happy with it

[@NormalNvim]

Foot terminal is objectively the best performing terminal for the case of use of working with VIM.

[@Reducer]

I've been using kitty for about a year now... but I'm doing absolutely nothing fancy whatsoever with it. Should really look more at what it can do.

[@VANTYCSolutions]

Thank you! switching to kitty here.

[@benjaminschultz6501]

Good luck with Kitty. It works well, so long as you stay within the choke-hold configuration bounds of the developer. Changing fonts is a nightmare, but example. And if you look at the repo’s bug report page, you don’t have to dig deep to see that the developer can be a single-minded jerk at times.

[@solitudesf8111]

Yeah, he is based

[@takharamazanpolat7610]

How's changing the font a nightmare?

[@archip8021]

Lol he changes the font in the video takes literally 10 second

[@juipeltje]

i'm not sure what you mean by changing fonts being a nightmare. on both alacritty and kitty it was very simple

[@jongeduard]

Anyone explored Zutty terminal here? The developer has quite an extensive explanation in which he explains that it's the most correct working terminal which is also about as fast as Alacritty and Kitty.

[@zenitsu2989]

32 seconds in the video and I already know the missing feature, same reason why I left Alacritty. 😂

[@AqgvP07r-hq3vu]

Wezterm is amazing

[@aliventurous]

Nothing better than kitty right now. Cross platform, image support, excellent font rendering, uses less ram and cpu than wezterm. You also don't need tmux when working locally since kitty has built in window splitting and kitty sessions. Now you just need to install fish. Faster startup times than zsh. And their abbreviation feature for a saner command history.

[@falxie_]

i'm liking yazi a lot! it's to lf but with image previews

[@rkdeshdeepak4131]

ueberzug was right there

[@nichohells]

After 2 years or use, I replaced Alacritty with Gnome's Terminal because why not

[@alanxoc3]

I used alacritty & kitty before. But I'm using foot now since I'm on wayland... And I'm loving it.

[@skidkadda]

iTerm never dissapoints

[@H3cJP]

honestly i hate kitty i first used kitty, then i switched to alacritty because for me it was unusable slow, buggy, crashing all time... and i was not the only one to encounter this exact problems, i talked to more people on discord that had had the same problem buggy and crashing can be fixed, the thing with speed is that alacritty is just better, both are gpu accelerated but alacritty is way faster, which you can easily check doing a benchmark, for example doing a dd of /dev/random to a file of, lets say, 2GiB - and then, doing a cat to the random file and timing how long it takes to output all that its not really a killer thing, speed of stdout is mostly irrelevant, the only reason im commenting this is because you talked about speed in favour of kitty, which is just wrong TO BE CLEAR this is just my experience, i find kitty very interesting and, if i didnt had bugs, i would maybe use it maybe, because i dont really find the images feature useful (for me) and for multiplexxing i rather use tmux or zellij

[@ZombieLurker]

I like the customization of Kitty much better than all others but it is much slower than other terminal emulators. The Ghostty website has a 'cat' benchmark of the japanese bible that shows Kitty is almost as slow as the Mac terminal at around mid 300ms. Alacritty for comparison is at give or take 76ms. Wezterm was around 170ms. I am trying Wezterm but not liking the terminal tabs bar. Didn't like no border at all in Alacritty and think Kitty has my personal favorite looks. Most likely gonna switch back to it. Wezterm also works with Yazi for pictures in the terminal though.

[@fermelo100]

Yazi has a catpuccin theme also, so it all looks just purrfect

[@LeungWong]

might as well release next video about ditching kitty for wezterm ;)

[@turjaroy6502]

Well, I've been using ranger with ueberzug for a pretty long time, and it performs just well on Alacritty!

[@ReptilianLaserbeam]

thaaanks I moved to Kitty last month and hadn't had the time to configure it

[@kahvelikod2731]

Frankly, gnome terminal is enough for me. I used to use "terminator" long ago. (That weird red-framed terminal console, but this is also very good) . I will try Kitty soon. Your ability to explain is really good. Why don't you give programming training. Maybe on KZbin platform, maybe on your own website, maybe somewhere like udemy... I think you will be very successful...

[@stroiman.development]

4:45 Why quit and restart? You can reload the config at runtime. I have it on cmd+ctrl+, on Mac (think it's default)

[@typecraft_dev]

Honestly I didn’t think about it!

[@meowsqueak]

Team rxvt-unicode-256color forever. Every other one I’ve tried has something stupid about it - whether it’s copy/paste nonsense, or font kerning problems, or lack of search, or bad ssh confit, or too much decoration… rxvt-unicode-256color is fast, lightweight and configurable.

[@lukeh9897]

Once I figured out how to add kitty compatibility within ssh I am happy with it if the target machine doesn’t have kitty or its files you can’t use backspace and other functions while ssh connected into it but there is documentation on how to fix the issue thank god 😊

[@hecate6834]

Ironically I switched from Kitty to Alacritty two weeks ago

[@EyasD04]

that's very interesting, can you please tell us why? i want to compare your reasons with the video

[@hecate6834]

@@EyasD04 Not particularly deep reasons, I feel that Alacritty is the much simpler tool while still doing everything I need. Config is easier to grasp and I also like the Vi mode :)

[@MichaelButlerC]

I really respect Kitty. But i actually switched from Kitty to Alacritty. If i remember correctly, with Kitty when i Ssh'd to a client's server the prompt was messed up for some reason and i couldn't figure out why. It didn't happen with Konsole or Alacritty so i decided not to go back . I also was reading some stuff about how against Tmux the Kitty dev is (i respect that too, he has his reasoning) and i like tmux, so I'd have to use something that worked well with it

[@GhostCoder83]

Like Both but love Kitty. In Kitty use Crtl+Shift+F5 to reload.

[@claymorwan]

It's so alacrover Time for kitty :3c

[@ficolas2]

Catppuccin, kitty and feed the kitties with fish

[@tech-nomade]

wtf, man, did literally the same (installing kitty for yazi and its image preview) just 2-3 days ago! lol. Convergent Evolution at work. Not ditching Alacritty yet, though. Will use kitty for yazi only.

[@snsaisa]

you're looking for 5:30 (not a reason to change but that's his reason)

[@The8BitHero]

I just switched FROM Kitty to Alacritty because of no smooth scrolling when using a touchpad.

[@jkjoker777]

i have/get to learn new tech all of the time. the one thing that has stayed consistent and I have zero desire to try new things on is my environment. alacritty, tmux, nvim pinnacle of “if it ain’t broke”

[@4awpawz449]

Yea, yazi is a really nice file explorer and it works perfectly in western also. Regarding fish, has it improved in its compliance with bash scripts? Thanks for sharing.

[@dr.mikeybee]

I need the blocks that the warp terminal has. As far as I know, no other terminal offers blocks.

[@oalfodr]

Before watching past the intro, my guess feature you want is sixel

[@oalfodr]

I was close. But I do not need neither their protocol nor sixel because I think ueberzugpp is more portable solution.

[@StefanSonesson]

Currently looking at how to open files from yazi in different editors depending on file extension. E.g. *.txt with nvim, *.java with Intellij. Is that the next video coming up? ;-)

[@DariusPaveliu]

On my Mac kitty runs really slow when it opens up with the shortcut I made in skhd, however on my Arch Linux system (I use arch btw) it works really great in sway. Other than that I've basically had a better experience overall with kitty.

[@KK-4ever]

personally I felt kitty to be slower than alacritty. right click copy paste(putty like) is sluggish on kitty while alacritty does that with ease and faster.

[@typecraft_dev]

Interesting! I haven’t noticed any slow downs. I’ll keep my eyes open

[@Linuxdirk]

On my system Alacrity runs much, much faster than kitty. Both use zsh with identical config, and on kitty it takes a literal second before the prompt is shown. Even with completely unconfigured bash or any other shell. Since I did not find any reliable documentation for such a behavior I 100% expect my system being weird here. But since I don’t use the terminal emulator’s features (i mainly switched from to kitty because urxvt didn’t support Wayland when I switched to Wayland) I absolutely do not care at all about the terminal emulator. As described, kitty started acting weird on my system, so I switched to Alacrity. When at some point in the future Alacrity starts getting weird, I just switch to something else.

[@theherk]

The only thing that would ever coax me off of wezterm would be smooth scrolling. I really wish wezterm, kitty, alacritty, or ghostty, would implement it.

[@XxZeldaxXXxLinkxX]

What TE has smooth scrolling?

[@theherk]

​@@XxZeldaxXXxLinkxX ​ Very few really. The VT320 had it way back, and it really improves not loosing your place while scrolling. The alacritty based terminal in Zed has it, there is one I can't recall the name of. Also, gnome-terminal, and neovide provides it too. But I really would like to see it in Wezterm.

[@youngsinatra2645]

ghostty will be the new meta (when it comes out)

[@steevtupanwael]

thanks for sharing like your video.. try foot terminal if on hyprland, awesome experience

[@lIlIllIlIlIllIlIllIlIlIl]

Kitty < Alacritty < st

[@UliTroyo]

I ditched Alacritty for Kitty, then WezTerm. Love WezTerm, I use it with Nushell, so I’m oxidized.