Why does Alacritty terminal gets more attention than Kitty?

[horta]

Kitty is super fast. Very stable. Well maintained. Provide the minimal features (split screen, tabs) for a fully working terminal (no need to add another indirection layer, like tmux, that will add complexity to your workflow, or hope that your OS have a window manager that will fill the features gap left by Alacritty).

I understand the point of Alacritty, their reasons, and it is a great terminal but it seems that Kitty has all of Alacritty's strenghts plus do not lack the minimal set of features to make it a fully working terminal out-of-the-box.

[SolitudeSF]

it doesnt have rust circlejerk

[kovidgoyal]

Well, go out and spread the word :)

[Luflosi]

Alacritty runs on Windows and is the default terminal emulator on Sway.

[kovidgoyal]

Closing as not really a bug, but feel free to continue the discussion.

[ctrlcctrlv]

Alacritty is a gimmick TE. That's why. Its authors are good at marketing. Its main gimmick is its alleged speed. Meanwhile we're really trying to build a terminal emulator useful for most people, we don't need to make ridiculous claims, which, if true, are only so due to severe lack of useful features.

I wrote a blog post a while ago about why I don't like Alacritty or indeed most of the Rust ecosystem: https://gist.github.com/ctrlcctrlv/978b3ee4f55d4b4ec415a985e01cb1c9

[kovidgoyal]

Here, we have some hardware based measurements showing kitty's latency is optimal, and much better than alacritty's (35ms vs 50ms)

To make it even better, I am guessing these tests were done with kitty's default settings which deliberately introduce a few ms of latency in the loop, to save energy.

Here are some more measurements, by the author of the notcurses library, showing kitty's throughput is the fastest as well. And for drawing graphics.

Finally, below there are measurements using typometer showing keyboard to screen latency for kitty at 7ms vs 30ms for alacritty

[ctrlcctrlv]

That doesn't surprise me at all @kovidgoyal. The Alacritty devs have a very lopsided idea of what kind of speed even matters. They think it's just CPU operations...lol.

[pentago]

To those who land on this discussion..
The main difference today (Oct 2020) is:
Kitty doesn't work on MacOS High Sierra (perhaps even some builds up) while Allacrity does.

https://i.imgur.com/A3oICfi.png

[ctrlcctrlv]

@pentago start a new issue.

[Luflosi]

This is actually known: #2783.
Apparently the notarisation broke it though there is probably a workaround that we haven't figured out.

[pentago]

@ctrlcctrlv no need for new issue, I'm happy Alacritty user as compared to Kitty, it works on my antique of an OS.

[ctrlcctrlv]

So you're just here to troll then and not improve Kitty?

[coquizen]

Kitty is super fast. Very stable. Well maintained. Provide the minimal features (split screen, tabs) for a fully working terminal (no need to add another indirection layer, like tmux, that will add complexity to your workflow, or hope that your OS have a window manager that will fill the features gap left by Alacritty).

I understand the point of Alacritty, their reasons, and it is a great terminal but it seems that Kitty has all of Alacritty's strenghts plus do not lack the minimal set of features to make it a fully working terminal out-of-the-box.

Where tmux really shines is persistence across sessions (whether remotely or locally). Its ability to manipulate windows and panes is not what draws most people to it.

[Penguin-Guru]

Weighing in as a person who was just faced with the decision, I chose Alacritty because:

1. It was much better maintained in my distribution's repository-- was more current, had a couple less bugs, had less serious bugs, and was packaged to be more modular.
2. It didn't depend on as many other packages.
3. Kitty's features do seem great but the emphasis on packing multiple sub-terminals into a single window is redundant since I already use i3/sway for that.

Sorry if this seems overly critical. I definitely would have chosen Kitty if not for those. Still open to trying it in the future.

[kenranunderscore]

I have a couple of points to add that I haven't seen yet:

• I use macOS at work and NixOS or some other GNU/Linux variant at home. Ideally, I'd like to use the "same" terminal emulator on both system, with as few differences in configuration as possible. On paper, both kitty and alacritty would be good candidates. But alacritty has one big flaw (there's a huge issue open for it, but nothing really going on): it does not work correctly when using an alternative (manually created) keyboard layout on macOS; there's something wrong with the underlying library that manages the input, because it seems to react to the correct scancode, but not keycode. kitty has no such problems on any system that I've tried it on.
• The font rendering seems to be so much better in kitty. Again, on a Linux system this is not as noticeable, but on macOS I have to choose way lighter font variants in alacritty.

So for anyone else that's on the fence and happens to like tinkering with keyboard layouts on macOS: kitty is your go-to terminal emulator!

I don't even use many of kitty's features, like multiple windows or tabs. Maybe that is why I've yet to run into any problems with it.

[junguler]

i'm stuck on windows as i'm a huge gamer and you guys don't make a windows version, i was so happy when i heard about this project and how it's multi platform and then i saw that it's not on windows and all my hype died instantly.

[dcow]

Every time I spin up kitty and Alacritty side-by-side, kitty has prevailed. When kitty launched it was a stable, feature complete terminal emulator. Alacritty had numerous text rendering issues (overlapped characters, incorrect font weights, doesn't respect system DPI scaling settings, flashing lines, you name it). What's the point of fast if the screen doesn't render accurately?

I thought I'd give Alacritty a try again and I run into crap like this: alacritty/alacritty#4673. New versions of Alacritty don't even pass gatekeeper and the maintainers disparage macOS users as idiots who wasted money on Apple hardware (it's in one of the linked issues). Not even a primary macOS user but, nope, sorry, zzz...

Kitty is a solid, stable, gpu-backed terminal emulator that feels far more polished than Alacritty (although the rendering in Alacritty has improved slightly). Kitty landed solid and has only been maturing over the years. Alacritty still has a long ways to go technically and maturity-wise. Also, kitty's layout support is awesome!

[gbaranski]

I'm using alacritty because I don't want features like tabs or panes, because I use either tmux or i3 to do it.

[horta]

That is fair, @gbaranski . I guess alacritty and kitty (and iterm2) are just the best terminals in their our niches.

[trygveaa]

I'm using alacritty because I don't want features like tabs or panes, because I use either tmux or i3 to do it.

@gbaranski: How is that a reason? I don't use tabs, but kitty having support for it doesn't affect me in any way.

[gbaranski]

I'm using alacritty because I don't want features like tabs or panes, because I use either tmux or i3 to do it.

@gbaranski: How is that a reason? I don't use tabs, but kitty having support for it doesn't affect me in any way.

I don't like having something that I don't use. And I prefer something really minimalistic.

That is fair, @gbaranski . I guess alacritty and kitty (and iterm2) are just the best terminals in their our niches.

Actually I've used iTerm2 before but switched to alacritty, iTerm2 has a lot of unessesary crap and its much slower. And also it doesn't work on Linux.

[Sleepful]

+1 point for Kitty. Alacritty does not have an equivalent option to macos_option_as_alt yes.
Related issue. (however, it looks like you can make a workaround).

[tvidal-net]

Found this thread and wanted to leave my 2 cents. Found alacritty on DistroTube channel and immediately fell in love with it, but was disappointed that it did not have font-ligatures. Found kitty in another video on the same channel and was also disappointed that it cannot map the right mouse button to paste, and as per #1033, developer seems to treat kitty as a personal project disregarding user feature requests.

Having to choose the best of two evils, I think the right mouse button to paste will be missed a lot more, as middle-clicking to paste often causes undesirable accidental scroll. So I reckon I'll have to live without font-ligatures for now, alacritty is the chosen one.

[Sleepful]

Would be interesting to compare how many lines of code each project has.

[SolitudeSF]

Would be interesting to compare how many lines of code each project has.

this is meaningless comparison crosslanguage (and often even in same language).

[gbaranski]

Would be interesting to compare how many lines of code each project has.

Alacritty:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Language             Files        Lines        Blank      Comment         Code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Rust                    66        24253         3740         2642        17871
 Markdown                 7         1704          399            0         1305
 Plain Text               1          779           58            0          721
 Bourne Shell             4          196           16           24          156
 Toml                     5          155           20            0          135
 JSON                   120          120            0            0          120
 Makefile                 1           66           12            0           54
 XML                      1           36            0            3           33
 YAML                     1          812           71          741            0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Total                  206        28121         4316         3410        20395
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kitty:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Language             Files        Lines        Blank      Comment         Code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 C                       72        44551         4837         2227        37487
 Python                 173        38011         5952         3030        29029
 C/C++ Header            56        27430         1381         7575        18474
 Objective-C              7         5995          845          377         4773
 reStructuredText        32         6861         2099            0         4762
 Plain Text               1         3692            0            0         3692
 JSON                     3          547           32            0          515
 HTML                     5          110           14            1           95
 CSS                      1          126           28            7           91
 Makefile                 2           63           16            8           39
 Markdown                 2           28            9            0           19
 VimL                     1           17            0            1           16
 Bourne Shell             1           30            3           11           16
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Total                  356       127461        15216        13237        99008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought that Kitty is written mostly in Python

[SolitudeSF]

@gbaranski you are also counting bundled glfw

[page-down]

@trygveaa
Unfortunately, I believe that --single-instance is handled in Python.

For the GPU part, you can choose to use iGPU, which might improve the startup speed.
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#why-does-kitty-sometimes-start-slowly-on-my-linux-system

[trygveaa]

@trygveaa Unfortunately, I believe that --single-instance is handled in Python.

Oh, okay. Though, even so kitty with --since-instance starts faster than alacritty at least on my machines.

For the GPU part, you can choose to use iGPU, which might improve the startup speed. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#why-does-kitty-sometimes-start-slowly-on-my-linux-system

Yeah, but I was thinking about general GPU initialization, not the specific issue mentioned there.

[kynrai]

I actually came back to have a look at kitty vs alacrity today and stumbled across this issue,

For me I was comparing idle CPU time and wide colour gamut support. I use Mac and the native Terminal.app and the popular iTerm2 both do not support the screens full colour gamut, kitty does not either and had higher idle CPU, alacrity had lower but not as low as native mac app but the difference in colour was instantly noticeable so i picked alacrity

[kovidgoyal]

I'm afraid all modern terminals support full 24bit color. There is zero difference between terminals in color gamut support. Different terminals map those 24bit colors to the screen in different ways (using different color spaces) and some people prefer one way over another, which is entirely subjective. And kitty's idle CPU consumption is zero once the cursor stops blinking, it just sits waiting for input. And I would be extremely surprised if that were not the case for alacritty too. Easily verified by building kitty with --extra-logging=event-loop you will see that once the cursor stops blinking the event loop doesnt even tick. Or use strace.

[ttys3]

here comes an Alacritty user. I switched from Alacritty to Kitty today.

anyway, Kitty is just amazing !

[ShadiestGoat]

Font ligatures & start times. I came from urxvt wanting for something more modern - and in comparison to urxvt, both terminals have an extremely slow startup time, however, kitty less so. Alacritty has an open issue for font ligature support, but little work is being done on that.
Another note of font, `╰' <- this is rendered much better on kitty than other terminals, and I don't understand why, since all use the same font.
I personally don't use the tabs & a lot of features of kitty, I have a tiled window manager which I like to use better than something like tmux. I would love it if this was modular, and you could just... not load this if you don't need it! But, as it stands I like kitty's performance.

[rizzini]

So you're just here to troll then and not improve Kitty?

To be honest, this issue became a circlejerk thing rather than anything else. No one is here to improve Kitty anymore.

[horta]

I still use Kitty on a daily basis. I use alacritty from time to time together with Kitty. They are both amazing tools for terminal people.

[ctrlcctrlv]

So you're just here to troll then and not improve Kitty?

To be honest, this issue became a circlejerk thing rather than anything else. No one is here to improve Kitty anymore.

Speak for yourself, several of my changes resulted from comments made here.

For example:

Dev hate sixel

Not true. It's partially my fault @kovidgoyal hasn't added Sixel support yet. He's right we can't add the broken C libsixel, and I haven't had time to write a libsixel C ABI compatible Rust libsixel we can link to instead. Kovid isn't against Sixel per se, unless his opinion changed since we last talked about it which I highly doubt, you're probably just being hyperbolic.

[ctrlcctrlv]

@ShadiestGoat

Another note of font, `╰' <- this is rendered much better on kitty than other terminals, and I don't understand why, since all use the same font.

Because kitty has built-in to its GLSL programs code to draw those, they are not even dropped down to the font level. This is the right way to do it, and I don't see a way to disable it, so you can add one if you want (personally I see no need).

[ShadiestGoat]

@ctrlcctrlv

@ShadiestGoat

Another note of font, `╰' <- this is rendered much better on kitty than other terminals, and I don't understand why, since all use the same font.

Because kitty has built-in to its GLSL programs code to draw those, they are not even dropped down to the font level. This is the right way to do it, and I don't see a way to disable it, so you can add one if you want (personally I see no need).

No, I too don't see why one would want to remove it. I quite like it. I did say it renders it better haha

[MuhammadcodR]

Alacritty is a gimmick TE. That's why. Its authors are good at marketing. Its main gimmick is its alleged speed. Meanwhile we're really trying to build a terminal emulator useful for most people, we don't need to make ridiculous claims, which, if true, are only so due to severe lack of useful features.

I wrote a blog post a while ago about why I don't like Alacritty or indeed most of the Rust ecosystem: https://gist.github.com/ctrlcctrlv/978b3ee4f55d4b4ec415a985e01cb1c9

it's your opinion! I have tried both in my case alacritty is slightly faster and more smooth

[ctrlcctrlv]

It is, indeed, my opinion. "More smooth" is not a benchmark.

[MuhammadcodR]

It is, indeed, my opinion. "More smooth" is not a benchmark.

I don't care for benchmark...I chose the one who is faster and better for me....i use both but alacritty is slightly more and don't make fun of any developers....everything created for good

[ctrlcctrlv]

Okay? I don't care what terminal you or anyone else uses dude.

[MuhammadcodR]

Kitty is super fast. Very stable. Well maintained. Provide the minimal features (split screen, tabs) for a fully working terminal (no need to add another indirection layer, like tmux, that will add complexity to your workflow, or hope that your OS have a window manager that will fill the features gap left by Alacritty).

I understand the point of Alacritty, their reasons, and it is a great terminal but it seems that Kitty has all of Alacritty's strenghts plus do not lack the minimal set of features to make it a fully working terminal out-of-the-box.

ghanta! The truth is you are the developer and just promoting kitty for your sake...Alacritty is best Minimal and highly customizable

[ctrlcctrlv]

@kovidgoyal Yesterday I asked you to unlock an issue, today I ask you to lock one. This issue has become nothing but a timesink when fanboys come here to defend their preferred TE.

[MuhammadcodR]

@kovidgoyal Yesterday I asked you to unlock an issue, today I ask you to lock one. This issue has become nothing but a timesink when fanboys come here to defend their preferred TE.

First of all i didn't talk to you.... you are more worried than developer themselves? 🤣 what's your problem? second, You said you Don't care what i use or other...visit best neurologist near you for treatment as soon as possible....third, look at yourself first a biased kitty fanboy....fourth how you people have so much useless time to fight online? And yeah close this useless thing....if people need to choose one they try both and choose what is best for their need...most of the people prefer alacritty why because yeah they are stupid and you are the only smart person in this world

[ctrlcctrlv]

lol

[MuhammadcodR]

lol

Lol 😂this is my real account go to sleep you can't do anything 🤣 biased person and I don't care if any of my account deleted i am a real man not like you who depends on social media

[SolitudeSF]

it's your opinion! I have tried both in my case alacritty is slightly faster and more smooth

it's your opinion! I have tried both in my case kitty is slightly faster and more smooth

[MuhammadcodR]

it's your opinion! I have tried both in my case alacritty is slightly faster and more smooth

it's your opinion! I have tried both in my case kitty is slightly faster and more smooth

Ok thats what i am saying people should try both and find what they like Dont be @ctrlcctrlv

[SolitudeSF]

no, you just bought into alacritty propaganda and present your subjective optinion backed up by nothing as a sign of its superiority

[MuhammadcodR]

no, you just bought into alacritty propaganda and present your subjective optinion backed up by nothing as a sign of its superiority

Okay but who start the kitty propaganda? And what's your backed up sign? Be a real man

[SolitudeSF]

"but you, what about you". grow up.

[MuhammadcodR]

"but you, what about you". grow up.

Don't change the topic....who start the propaganda? Person who are wrong always change the topic...you should grow up and stop these things...people can try both and find which is better for themselves how many times i need to put these into your brain?

[ctrlcctrlv]

You are both misunderstanding what I was using this issue for.

When people would write complaints with Kitty here, I'd investigate them. I'd fix the ones I could fix, or at least come to conclusions as to what is blocking the ones I could not (yet) fix.

Therefore, when I would ask people followup questions or start issues off of this one, that is what I was doing. My work on Kitty is not done to make anyone use, or stop using, any Terminal Emulator.

As stated, despite downvotes (what is this, Reddit?), I'll restate it:

I don't care what terminal you or anyone else uses dude.

This issue no longer serves any purpose to the project because it has just become arguing about which terminal is better, and ad hominem† attacks.

Therefore I requested the issue be closed, as it serves no continued purpose to the project.

_{† I.e., ad ursam viridem.}