Goodbye Alacritty - Hello Kitty!

I swear the title was a mistake, but I love it anyways. lol. Today I talk about my switch to the Kitty terminal emulator.
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==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====
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==== Referenced ====
sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
#kitty #terminal #thelinuxcast

[@TheLinuxCast]

I release a weekly Patron only podcast. If you'd like to get access, head on over to patreon.com/thelinuxcast or hit the Join button just above.

[@vehementham]

Nice. Thanls for putting that there lol. I don't check Patreon/

[@zeocamo]

Matt, Kitty can reload the config(ctrl+shift+f5), but you can also use ctrl+shift+f2 to edit the config and then save it and do that for you.

[@tomasruzicka9835]

Compiling and building code does not put strain on the terminal in my experience. What you will notice is when you run an application that dumps gigabytes of logs into the stdout or stderr. That can slow down the app quite a bit if you have slow terminal. Compilers usually don't do that, it only prints out the bugs that you make or some nitpicks it may complain about, which hopefully is not that big of an ammount. As for alacritty vs kitty, I experienced some issues with fonts with alacritty, but that may have been something very particular. I was trying to make powerline work in vim and it happenned to work in kitty and not in alacritty. Ligatures are when you write

[@_Verac]

Kitty is made by a single man who isn't even a full time developer rather he is doing phd in physics from Caltech. His name is Kovid Goyal and developers like him deserve a shoutout for making such awesome tools for free.

[@kushalpsv]

I am sure he is doing open source full time and currently living in india (atleast based on his patreon), he is also developer of calibre which is another awesome tool for ebook reading.

[@schemage2210]

I love the idea that addons or extensions are known as "kittens". That is so cute!

[@distant6606]

Ive exclusively used alacritty as my terminal emulator of choice for the last 5-6 years now.(basically since the start of my linux journey/alacritty project). I only recently switched to kitty as I switched to wayland-hyprland && it came preconfigured with a theme install script that I used. Really good experience so far.

[@thingsiplay]

I used Kitty in the past and its the best. One of my favorite features is a shortcut to open last program output right in Vim. While Kitty has scrollback, nothing beats using Vim search functionality for the last program output.

[@BenjaminWheeler0510]

Technically I think it’s more like less than vim

[@thingsiplay]

@@BenjaminWheeler0510 Oh that's possible. Maybe I had something configured to open it in Vim then. Totally forgot this might be a setting on my own.

[@CrazyMineCuber]

@@BenjaminWheeler0510 I think the other guy is refering to being able to redirect the scroll back to any program of your choice. So I use neovim to search throuhg and copy my scrollback buffer. But noting is stopping your from sending it wherever you want.

[@themroc8231]

5:59 Now hear me out : so there are these things people call "bookmarks"...

[@TheLinuxCast]

Lame. Lol

[@themroc8231]

And i thought I was a hoarder because I can have like 30 tabs opened on a bad day.

[@smolbirb4]

Wow this is great! Literally about 30 minutes ago I was researching and comparing the two! Can’t wait to see the bid

[@Linuxdirk]

I switched to kitty from urxvt circa 3 years ago and I am very happy with it. The configuration file is just annoying, yes. I simply completely removed everything and used the website to guide me while configuring. The advanced features (showing images, etc.) and the built-in tiling capabilities are just awesome! It also has a fully features plugins interface.

[@memorysticky7581]

been watching your videos for quite awhile. very informative. I just subbed finally, thanks.

[@the_linux_legend6199]

Their might be a way to save tabs in kitty although very convuluted and complicated. The basic idea is that kitty has a remote control feature which allows you to get all open windows and tabs in a json output which you would have to parse with jq and than write each tab with its corresponding name which correlates with the last executed command in the tab or window and write this to a file and than figure out a way to reopen all tabs in the file based on amount and name with a script when hitting the keybinding to open or close the terminal. As i said very complicated but something to think about messing around with.

[@sweetbabyalaska]

I've tried all of the image protocols and I have to say that Kitty's is the fastest. The images just load nearly instantly and the quality is perfect. I made a little bash script that lets me pick an image and set it as my background, rotate it, and more.

[@MyAJVideo]

Where did you get those wallpapers?

[@raymondshiner1046]

Hey man, wanted to say I recently found your videos, and i love them! Your down to earth style and kind tone are very refreshing when many of the youtubers for arch/linux things I've seen has been closer to ThePrimagen in tone. Keep it up man! Also, I was surprised to hear that such a hard core linux user doesn't program! I'm a programmer myself, and as such almost all the linux people I've met have been programmers. Have you done a video on why you like linux sans programming? I'd be fascinated to see it!

[@TheLinuxCast]

Glad you liked the videos! I dabble now. I've learned some python and a bunch of C since this video came out

[@JoshPeterson]

The more I learn about kitty, the more I'm compelled to try it. I tried alacrityy the other day but was instantly turned off when I found out the devs refused to integrate background image support. Seeing kitty work beautifully with images in ranger is what just sold me.

[@vitormelo22]

Kitty is very nice. Good font display, easy config file, tabs, custom shortcuts, split panel and the main Dev is very attentive.

[@penguintech9800]

Great, thx for info. Didnt have time to search for good terminals. Just used basic terminals from MATE or from Cinnamon DE.

[@Shokyto]

For a Wayland alternative, my terminal of choice is "foot", "ranger-git" now has sixel support already, blazing fast! :)

[@rookas6274]

started using foot because it was the default on sway, and haven't felt a need to switch from it since. works very well :)

[@kirangeorge8]

Looks awesome! Can you please make a video on how you configure your setup from installing os to customisation to tiling window manager, bars and terminal emulator.

[@LINUXBANDIT]

Personally, even in a gnome desktop environment, I go outta my way to get and use an XFCE4 terminal emulator due to its wallpaper options. Wallpaper in neofetch just hits different.

[@OcteractSG]

Agreed. I do like Konsole’s ability add space between the text and the window border, though. It’s great for screenshots.

[@hotpotcookie]

@@OcteractSG you could also achieve this by using gtk-css which may only contains 2-3 lines of code, which is kool

[@djyotta]

FYI alacritty worked out of the box showing image previews in ranger for me. Don't have ueberzug installed as far as I know. Did try kitty anyway, but some defaults, namely the terminal bell, piss me off so I won't switch until I know how to turn that off.

[@AbdulRafay-vi6hz]

I use Kitty on a daily basis, and I love it. I did switch to Alacrity, but it's alright, and both get the job done.

[@NSMau_]

Hello, there. Great video. May I ask what's the colorscheme you're using here?

[@TheLinuxCast]

It was a colorscheme generated by pywal

[@BenjaminWheeler0510]

How did you get the blurred window? I’m a gnome user so blurred windows are… difficult ? Lol

[@StfuSiriusly]

Can you do a video on your full config? I have been using PopOS for the last 3 years but only recently have been trying to make it look good. What do you use for your terminal prompt? And how do you have everything switch colors when you change your background image? Would appreciate it

[@burpsan]

Good stuff!

[@TheNoirKamui]

I just installed kitty from apt and none of the Fkeys work. Instead of getting info from ctrl+shift+F1 i get a [1;6P in the line. And I can't find any help in the documentation on that. It's unusable. version 0.21.2 btw

[@Jool4832]

13:50 A ligature is basically a fusion of two letters together. One of the ligatures is œ. fl may also be displayed as a ligature.

[@ForeverZer0]

As is likely the case for many, I write code in my terminal and am accustomed to ligatures, it is one of the primary requirements I have, and it and the reason I started using kitty. I did recently discover wezterm, and it is surprisingly top-tier and finally knocked kitty off of first place for me when it comes to terminals.

[@cultist7931]

oh, a fellow tab enthusiast i used to have 270+ tabs on firefox like a month ago or something and this is just only one of my many browsers xD

[@olaniyanayodele5986]

Do we ever get a setup video? From installation to de/tiling window, to terminal, to themes and customization to even tools for development like nvim or the others... Also love the videos and the channel Thank you❤

[@RenderingUser]

Yesss Fellow kitty user Really clean terminal. All I wish for tho, is proper right to left text support like konsole or gnome-terminal has

[@nado911]

Youre correct about the manual refresh. Its ctrl-shift-F5. Im a fan of kitty as well, my one gripe with it is it some times gets real buggy in SSH sessions. I.e you cant use backspace, it only allows new characters

[@blank001]

Can't remember the exact command but you can fix it easily with a one liner, you only need to run it once per remote machine, and forget about the issue even exists. (I have an alias that does this fo me so I don't even need to remember ever time I need one)

[@trashthoughts388]

I really love Kitty, i just wish they give us more tabs options, other thing is, for me at least with a 4th tab open, the terminal gets kinda slow

[@StarFlower86]

Welcome to the Kitty club !! kitty is my fav terminal emulator, its one of the best terminal emulators

[@brivism]

Wezterm is good alternative for alacritty and kitty as well. For nvim gang, it's lua-based configuration is very appealing

[@ForeverZer0]

Yeah, recently switched from kitty to wezterm. I had only even discovered it very recently, but it has all the things I like about kitty, but a few additional things that make it even better IMHO. Definitely agree it is a good pairing for nvim.

[@zcalex7660]

been using kitty for a while and love it.

[@wojteksowinski248]

FYI ueberzug is no longer maintained (last time I checked) so that’s probably why you couldn’t get image previews with alacritty working

[@heroe1486]

Alacritty spawns a little bit quicker on my end but I can't imagine not using Kitty just because of the ssh kitten that copies the terminfos automatically to the remote server, other kittens like icat or the theming one are nice too. I don't use tabs or anything since I prefer to manage that with i3. + Alacrity doesn't support ligatures, or at least it didn't without a fork like a year ago. Btw ligatures is something that you can have with certain compatible fonts so for example you could have => shown like an arrow, it's for exemple useful for arrow functions , ex : (first_name,last_name) => first_name + last_name instead of defining the function in a common way like function my_name(first_name,last_name) { return first_name + last_name} Also useful for != displayed as it's in maths etc

[@RenderingUser]

From using like over 10 different terminals, I've observed the fastest terminals to launch were gnome-terminal and xterm Alacritty comes second. And kitty comes really low on the list. And cool-retro-term comes in last place. But even if kitty is slower to launch, is faster with usage. I reckon it's also got gpu acceleration which gnome-terminal lacks Well either way, my main terminal will always be kitty

[@heroe1486]

@@RenderingUser Nice to know, but really for kitty to miss my first key input after super + enter I really have to make it on purpose, doesn't reallymatter at that point, while things like ulauncher miss my first input and don;t come close to rofi

[@RenderingUser]

@@heroe1486 yea that is true It is annoying that you have to wait some time to make sure it launches before you start typing stuff That's why I got all my quick access stuff in rofi instead.

[@ForeverZer0]

​@@RenderingUser I don't use kitty anymore, switched to wezterm, but if you run kitty with the "--single-instance" flag, it daemonizes it, which moves into one of the fastest launching terminals.

[@RenderingUser]

@@ForeverZer0 yea i know about single instance that feature makes kitty the second fastest terminal on my system to launch (60-70ms) fastest being xterm (50ms) really epic feature. i also like how kitty is gpu accelerated, and can display images

[@spencerallen323]

I recently picked up kitty as part of my move from i3 and urxvt to hyprland. So far it seams fine, It's just done what I wanted it to do and gotten out of the way which I appreciate.

[@Bert-og9rk]

Ranger is what got me into kitty as well!

[@terminallyonline5296]

Alacritty just treats me right!

[@KENTOSI]

Is there an easy way to split vertically, and then switching between right and left? That's the one usecase I really need in a terminal emulator.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Not really, but if you use screen or Tmux, you can do that easily in any terminal Edit: though now that I think about it, Kitty does have something like that. sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/overview/#layouts

[@KENTOSI]

@@TheLinuxCast Ah nice, thanks for the fast reply. Much appreciated 👍

[@Montpelier-sama]

Time to test Kitty later on my Ubuntu Studio for starters.

[@sunriseleatherco.6587]

LMAO at "let me show you what my kitty looks like." :))

[@gregglenentine7660]

My thoughts exactly.... :) Nice double entendre Matt.

[@thetuxsteveoproject1363]

00:12 lol termomulator love it at least Im not the only one who gets tunged tied

[@deeptangshusaha7793]

I feel you bro even I have tons of tabs open 😂

[@coocoobau]

6:00 I have over 4000 tabs in chrome, still finding it difficult to get most of the closed as to me this is a kind of bookmark system :) It is not stupid, is something that some people prefer.

[@TheLinuxCast]

@@coocoobau Vivaldi would help. Tab workspaces and tab stacks are great for hoarders. It is what I use.

[@srinirg1]

Hi Linux Cast, 3 things I want to tell you: 1) I like your videos, 2) For whatever reason, I am finding that alacritty has a 2 second latency in my installation, but xfce4-terminal starts with no delay whatever! 3) Do please review i3status-rust. I found it a good and easy. I am curious what you think about it.

[@johanngambolputty5351]

ehh, why use tabs when you have different workspaces? Especially if the window titles adequately describe whats in them, then they can be search for in rofi...

[@DashieTM]

Alacritty and kitty are the same in terms of speed. However alacritty just doesn't want to support things like image preview which made me switch to kitty as well.

[@werethless12]

Alacritty was borked for me on Endeavor when I would SSH into other machines. No backspace at all lmao

[@UnhingedNW]

Been a fan of WezTerm lately

[@helixiod]

Does pywal work on wlroots based compositors?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yes. I saw someone use it on my discord.

[@arnaudtisset]

First of all I think both project are amazing but after trying alacrity for a while I had too much issue and not using it anymore . Alacrity didn’t support the font I’m using not a big deal I can live without it (ok no ligatures apparently) and I had those weird lags sometimes resizing I’m not the only one and that’s probably GPU drivers so nothing I can do about it . Will prob give a shot to kitty. I thought gpu accelerated terminal would make more of a difference for me

[@CausticAscarite]

I only used kitty for showing me pictures right in my terminal

[@GhostCoder83]

Crtl+Shift+u for emojis and kitty +kitten themes are cool features

[@gingered]

You are going to love Ctrl+shift+u

[@Flackon]

Kitty is my terminal of choice, too. Other than its awful, afwul default handling of ssh connections, I'm pretty happy with it

[@02ranger]

"Let me show you my kitty" This channel just took a hard left turn!! 😮

[@TheLinuxCast]

Rude. You don't want to see my kitty? (and it went too far.)

[@02ranger]

@@TheLinuxCast Now I didn't say that, it's just not what you expect on a Linux channel...

[@adjbutler]

so kitty was a skill issue for you??? cat got your tongue? cat's got claws baby!!! jokes... love you man!

[@erdanxiloscient3666]

Another option is wezterm. It also supports kitty’s graphics protocol and sixel, and it’s available x11, wayland, windows, mac, and I think the bsds

[@danielpicassomunoz2752]

I believe alacrity has tabs in cachyos

[@MrFreeGman]

I'd use kitty if it had a setting to show bold letters as bright colours. As it stands, that one single option ruined the look of many of my terminal apps, and the lead developer of kitty seems to hold some religious convictions on not allowing people to have certain config options that he deems unnecessary or "wrong", despite the fact that every other terminal emulator ever written has this option available, and many applications are written with that feature in mind.

[@justshitmyself]

wowzer

[@chyldstudios]

Another Kitty user. Meow!

[@SimGunther]

Kitty is cool on Mac OS X, but it's such a bother if you're on any arch/gentoo based Linux distro, which is why i made the switch to alacritty on that platform

[@user-hs7hf6sw4g]

Right choice)

[@martinhertz4957]

Off-topic, but personally use urxvt, because alacritty isn't faster here, about par roughly(timed tree command comparisson) and uses 10 times memory(psmem one instance, same font/size etc, cannot remember if using several instances lower this(the 10 fold I mean). St was fastest, and used less memory than urxvtd/urxvtc, unless going over 5 instances of urxvtc. Kitty always seemed bloated to me, but see the point of picture support builtin. Thanks for vid.

[@afroceltduck]

Here's a good idea for writing a simpler Kitty config, while still keeping the amazing amount of documentation the default config contains: Rename the default config, and then start a new, actual config containing only the stuff you need. Actually, that's a good tip for any config. I'm glad I thought of that. I use Kitty myself, for at least a few months now. I like it, but I mostly forgot all the keybindings to do things.

[@joshua_lee732]

I've made the switch to foot since I didn't use half the stuff alacritty provided.

[@IcarianHeights]

foot is great, wezterm is even better

[@yrjo5050]

I like built in tmux-like behavior.

[@jacksautorepair]

You could spend a lifetime learning these apps and never get anywhere. Some people spend 8 years in college, but they call them doctors. You can spend 18 years using Linux and terminal apps and never get anywhere. I read an article that said 90% of iOS app developers which are small developers are now millionaires! Linux free software developers struggle to make a dollar. Linux is like learning how to manipulate SQL databases, but you have no real data or business, so wth is your end goal. I noticed those promoting alternative desktop operating systems spend all their time working on free software and the operating system or desktop itself. That’s like purchasing a new car and you have to repair it on a daily basis. But you did not purchase the car to work on it, you purchased it to drive! Obsessing over technology itself is the road to failure. You eventually run out of time and wonder how you wasted your entire young health life. There is a limited time to make money from technology before that technology is replaced by something else. Information becomes common knowledge then it’s less valuable and obsolete. We also become obsolete.

[@vnpikachu4627]

Well said ❤

[@ff34jmr]

Kitty is nice in terms of performance but I’ve had all sort problems with it, specially SSHing into other machines.

[@Linuxdirk]

Yes, the target machine needs to have the kitty terminfo installed because it is not installed by default in most distributions.

[@CyperN077]

Me like Kitty too. tmux-ish plus images, yah

[@SwiatLinuksa]

Wait wait.. so thumbnail should be full of pink xD

[@wxn5211]

Only Alacritty or URxvt can select any text on terminal use keyboard.

[@wyfyj]

Kitty is fine, been using it. But trying to get used to wezterm

[@wyfyj]

It still feels "weird" seeing you use Arch. Even though I've seen you on Arch based distro's when I first started watching you over a year ago. How does nano feel now?

[@Clayvis4201]

KOVID GOYAL SUPREMACY

[@linearz]

My daily drive. Kitty, fish, midnight commander, rsync.

[@Ladas552]

Who would need Rsync daily? I use it only on creating backups

[@linearz]

@@Ladas552 deploying my code changes to servers.

[@Ladas552]

@@linearz can't git work better then?

[@linearz]

@@Ladas552 I'm happy with my current workflow for deployment

[@TheLinuxCast]

A lot of people use rsync to transfer files to the cloud. It's faster than git and often people don't need the dev stuff that comes with git

[@adityagautam4689]

by uberzerg, you mean urxvt?

[@TheLinuxCast]

no

[@adityagautam4689]

@@TheLinuxCast oh sorry

[@TheLinuxCast]

Ueberzug is an app to show images.

[@adityagautam4689]

@@TheLinuxCast got it ty

[@L6FTY]

Damn your terminal is so clean, can we have your config?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Link is in the description. But it might have changed since this video.

[@colin0516]

7:45

[@tmendoza6]

I am so screwed I have started using config files

[@patpopov]

Überzug is dead, long live Überzug++.

[@waltherstolzing9719]

I like Zutty.

[@MENTOKz]

so its KEY Value Pair 😁

[@TheLinuxCast]

I knew it was something like that. Lol

[@MENTOKz]

@@TheLinuxCast yeah I know u did u almost had it in the right order lol

[@jan5504]

insane ram usage for a an arch....

[@aslamlouati3930]

hello Mr. Mathew can you please make an install script for your qtile config ....Thank you!

[@twodigitss]

isnt like copy and paste from repo?

[@alexstone691]

I used to use kitty but wezterm has lua config which gives me more happy chemicals, extremely customizable and supports sixels too

[@srivathsansudarsanan3372]

I've been using wezterm for over 4 months. Loving it.

[@arnavsrivastava8788]

Can you share your kitty.config? It looks awesome

[@itsfish8672]

Matt I should try Kitty, but i enjoy Lxterminal to much an it works for me, GVM.

[@skooma4NaughtyLilGhoul]

😶.. 🤔 what?? features exactly dose alacritty lack, / tab hording🙉🙈

[@TheLinuxCast]

It's a good hobby.