Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator
49 comments
·September 20, 2025skayvr
My progression has been st -> kitty -> ghostty. I wanted to love st, but found too many unpolished corners. Kitty was great, but it felt like the exact opposite of st. Very large and opinionated. ghostty, at least originally, was new and something between st and kitty. With claude code I wonder where the landscape of personalized software will land. st and others may be on to something in this era.
mmgutz
[foot](https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot) is an excellent st alternative on wayland.
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calvinmorrison
I spent a long time on the gtk vte based terminals (sakura, I wrote my own called svte later), then to st until i had too many patches stacked, then alacritty, but that took a long time to get to because I couldnt figure out how the kerning was different than ST!
Now i am on that and it is fine
aidenn0
Whoever designed the default bindings for kitty clearly has a similar brain to mine. I think I adapted to those keybindings in about an hour, and can't use any other terminal without remapping the keys to match kitty.
lxe
Kitty terminal can essentially replace a big part of a linux desktop environment, if you want it to. It's infinitely customizable AND has own opinions at the same time.
Also my interactive scrollbar change was recently merged in, so if that was stopping you, you can now replace iTerm on your mac with it :)
Blackthorn
> infinitely customizable
Except for loading your own shaders, which they decided they weren't interested in and wouldn't support.
matheusmoreira
That reminds me I once tried to write a terminal emulator for libretro so I could run it on RetroArch with cool shaders. I had completely forgotten about that project...
Pretty weird that kitty wouldn't support custom shaders. It already has GPU rendering so why not.
Avshalom
? what do you think we're doing with our desktop environments?
unsungNovelty
What do you think we DON'T DO with our DEs? ;)
snickerdoodle14
[dead]
jauntywundrkind
My only guess is that this refers to graphical rendering support. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/
I both see enormous value mixing text and console, and also worry that TUI will overcomplicate and add even more unnecessary embellishment than it already is trending towards? Semi grump opinion. But it feels weird introducing a new canvas.
I do like the idea of graphics being online in a terminal session. Not a captive app experience in a text/graphic UI, but just cli commands that can have some more visual output too.
fluidcruft
Finally a terminal with banner ads support!
wkat4242
It's not exactly new and it solves many problems of the older sixel protocol that stems from the age of DEC terminals way before full colour stuff.
GuinansEyebrows
> Kitty terminal can essentially replace a big part of a linux desktop environment, if you want it to. It's infinitely customizable AND has own opinions at the same time.
i'm interested in this idea. can you expand on that? what functionality are you replacing? i don't currently use a DE and i get along pretty well doing most of my work in alacritty and firefox-esr. occasionally i drop into pcmanfm if i need a visual file browser, and i use feh to preview images.
mmgutz
I'm on wayland. Kitty can be used as a layershell window. So you can build panels, taskbars, etc if you were so inclined. For example, you want fastfetch or htop as a live desktop background? Kitty can do that.
calvinmorrison
I'd like to introduce you to conky
metadat
Is this different from the KiTTY variant of PuTTY?
https://www.9bis.net/kitty/index.html
I'm just confused now, haha. What's in a name, anyways...
unpopularopp
I'm probably the extreme minority on HN (0.00001%) but I pretty much never used any CLI applications. Just never really needed them. But recently at work (we use Macs) I had some tasks which need the Terminal.app so I kinda tried to dig in and learn some stuff but whenever I feel I already know something (more or less) there is always some new stuff entering the picture next day. Shell, console, terminal... now a terminal _emulator_ :insert exploding galaxy brain meme:
unsungNovelty
Checkout clis like ranger (fm), Calcurse, bpytop/btop/htop/top, neovim, taskwarrior...
They are all cool. Probably missing crores of other clis that are cool.
JdeBP
They are all terminal emulators. You have probably, as one who has never used the command line, never touched an actual terminal.
fluoridation
A shell is not a terminal emulator. It's a program that does text I/O (perhaps with a terminal, perhaps not) and implements basic system functionality like executing programs and often scripting.
MangoToupe
Most people interact with a shell through a terminal emulator, though. The alternative is something like emacs's eshell. Or an actual "terminal" which hasn't been even available for purchase for many decades.
sorrythanks
"console", "terminal" and "terminal emulator" all refer to the same thing. "shell" is the read-eval-print-loop interface you use to work in the terminal.
JdeBP
Please don't confuse the novices. A console is either a special kernel device or a UI subsystem; a terminal is a physical piece of kit; and a terminal emulator is an application that runs on a general purpose computer that emulates one of the aforementioned pieces of kit.
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/freebsd-conso...
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/linux-console...
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/linux-vt.xml
fluoridation
You're assigning a rigidity to these terms that they simply don't have. A "console", in the oldest sense of the term, is any place where a user interfaces with a computer, or more broadly with any kind of machine.
>Borrowed from French console (“bracket”, noun), from consoler (“to console, to comfort”, verb). Sense of “bracket” either due to a bracket alleviating the load, or due to brackets being decorated with the Christian figure of a consolateur (“consoler”), itself perhaps a pun on the first sense (alleviating load). Originally used for the bracket itself, then for wall-mounted tables (mounted with a bracket), then for free-standing tables placed against a wall. Use for control system dates at least to 1880s for an “organ console”; use for electrical or electronic control systems dates at least to 1930s in radio, television, and system control, particularly as “mixer console” or “control console”, attached to an equipment rack.
A "terminal" is a text-only console. For a long time, "terminal" and "console" were synonymous. By metaphor, in the same way that a "desktop" is not a desktop, referring to a terminal emulator as a console is perfectly acceptable, and everyone will understand what is meant.
kstrauser
Technically true, but I’ve never heard anyone say “open a terminal emulator and type…”
skydhash
Long story short: Terminals were the result of moving teleprinting stuff from paper to the screen. The shell is program that accept commands and execute the relevant program and I’m pretty sure console was the whole apparatus.
But now we moved the whole protocol to a program (an emilator) instead, and console refers to the initial boot environment, the attached display, keyboard pair (because you can still use another computer as the interface for control).
But the protocol is fairly old and some stuff clashes with current paradigms for using a computers.
lxe
I've been using a terminal extensively for over twenty years. However, I was never able to get to the whole Vim and mouse-less keyboard only setup. If you can live your life to the fullest without using the terminal, I kind of envy you.
candleknight
kitty is great, but I stopped using it because iTerm's terminal search feature - which I use almost daily - is much more ergonomic. The existing solution in kitty (pipe scrollback buffer to something like less/vim and search with /) is a lot worse IMO which is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me
rimmontrieu
Currently I use ghostty but kitty was my daily driver for years. It works great on old macOs too.
dartharva
Is it really that hard to add Windows support for these terminal projects? I understand they are more valued in Linux circles but it's not like nobody on Windows is using the terminal.
matheusmoreira
Probably the best terminal emulator in existence today. It really pushes the envelope of what's possible to do with terminals. Also has superb font rendering and is very customizable.
fishgoesblub
Unfortunately the dev intentionally refuses to add Bitmap font support for fonts like Terminus.
jhbadger
The author is an interesting character of strong, often contrarian, opinion. He's also the guy behind the Calibre e-book software, which was largely written in Python 2 long after that was deprecated. He even wanted to maintain Python 2 himself rather than rewrite Calibre, but he eventually realized that wasn't feasible and ported Calibre to Python 3.
jchook
Incredible popular software lore here. Calibre and Kitty are two of my favorite pieces of software in the world.
hyperpl
Also realized this when trying to get terminus to work. I like the simplicity of foot in wayland and st/alacritty in Xorg. I wish I could find a terminus replacement and I do give it a few hours each year but still haven't had any luck...
SlightlyLeftPad
Is that because of a performance impact with rendering those possibly? Imm curious what the justification for or against is.
dfc
The developer is up front about the issue:
> One of kitty's fundamental features is the ability to display fonts at arbitrary font sizes, which bitmap fonts are not suited for.
> So if you like bitmap fonts, kitty is not for you.
It's hard to argue with that logic.
cursedpikachu
Kovid is sort of an arrogant douchebag https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946
beanjuiceII
almost got through a HN thread without seeing anyone making some kinda of remark, just let it go
My favorite aspect of kitty is the infinite scrollback. My scrollback is 10000 lines long and scrollback buffer itself can store 1 GB worth of history.[0] When you hit a certain shortcut, you can use any pager to search through the scrollback. It's all very fast.
[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/84225d914acd226863e...