Kitty – GPU Based Terminal Emulator
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The discussion around Kitty, a GPU-based terminal emulator, highlights its customizability, performance, and innovative features, with users sharing their experiences and concerns about its development and potential drawbacks.
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Sep 20, 2025 at 9:51 AM EDT
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
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 :)
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.
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.
Except for loading your own shaders, which they decided they weren't interested in and wouldn't support.
Pretty weird that kitty wouldn't support custom shaders. It already has GPU rendering so why not.
> 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.
And at the time of the beef, many bigger apps were not ported yet (some even till today). The authors' opinion was more an extremer version of something the whole community felt at the time.
Now i am on that and it is fine
https://www.9bis.net/kitty/index.html
I'm just confused now, haha. What's in a name, anyways...
* 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
* https://blog.bruchez.name/posts/televideo-912-terminal-1/
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/a-cli-is-not-a-dos-prompt.html
You'll rarely find them actually called "command prompt" on the operating systems that Kitty runs on, though, including the operating system that unpopularopp uses. That's largely a Microsoft-ism, and one that has in fact been quietly eroding in the Microsoft world for years since the advent of PowerShell and Microsoft Terminal, with people now more and more writing and talking about opening "PowerShell" or "Terminal" rather than opening "command prompt".
On the operating systems that Kitty runs on, they're called terminal emulators, especially in their own doco and blurbs (as with Kitty, here), and when it comes to desktop menus usually (in contrast to the Microsoft Windows "command prompt" shortcut) have their actual names (Konsole, XTerm, UXTerm, RXVT Unicode, and so on being listed under their names, with GNOME Terminal and its derivatives and Apple's Terminal being somewhat exceptional rather than the rule).
>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.
A console is not even necessarily the same abstraction as a terminal, let alone always synonymous with a terminal emulator, and "referring to a terminal emulator as a console" is not only not perfectly acceptable, it is downright erroneous on all of the platforms on which Kitty runs including the platform used by unpopularopp where XNU's console is very specifically a serial or video special kernel device. You are confusing the novices, too.
To clarify, you don't like it.
>it is downright erroneous on all of the platforms on which Kitty runs
You make it sound like saying something "erroneous" (which of course I don't agree it is) is some kind of magic spell that does something. "Kitty is a console." What, what did that do?
>You are confusing the novices, too.
Uh huh. Literally no one is confused by these terms, you're just disagreeing with the usages. Say to someone "open up an xterm console" and I guarantee you they will understand that you want them to start an instance of xterm, not that you're having a stroke.
>XNU's console is very specifically a serial or video special kernel device.
If a system uses a word to refer to something specific, that doesn't co-opt the meaning of the word. An "XNU console" and a "console" in the broad sense are distinguishable concepts.
<Proceeds to dump a bunch of irrelevant minutia and links>
Lol my man I don't think you're the right person to be taking advice from on how to not confuse people.
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.
They are all cool. Probably missing crores of other clis that are cool.
[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/84225d914acd226863e...
There are definitely some that don't, or don't make it configurable, which for me just gives me pretty strong incentive not to use them.
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty
[1] https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo
https://0x0.st/KBiM.png
https://0x0.st/8SqV.png
https://0x0.st/KBie.png
https://0x0.st/8Sq4.png
That stack trace is fake btw, just means 404.
What I don't like:
- No remote terminal persistence solution in the works + termux/screen incompatibility.
- Two modes of font rendering and both are meh. Legacy is uneven and jagged, modern has unbalanced perceived font thickness for dark-on-light and light-on-dark, and the modifications can only make it more unbalanced.
Have no complaints besides that. Default keybindings are ok, performance is great, features are plenty, configuration is easy. Font config `kitten` is great.
I see no need for the GPU trendy terminals, and same applies to running HLSL shaders on Windows Terminal.
At the same time, it's perfectly usable with opinionates defaults.
Run `kitten` and check out the default kittens, there are some gems in there.
Even if the GPU is more efficient than the CPU, I would think it's better to keep the GPU asleep when you're just typing in vim.