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by isqueiros3 hours ago |
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upvoteby crossroadsguy2 hours ago|
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A significant differenciator is the dev/maintainer I'd say. No, really, hear me out :) I'd start with: this goes for almost any FOSS tool, not just this. Not saying one is good, one is not – but user choices, user feedback, interactions, deisgn goals/choices get affected (and sometimes influence) a lot based on how a dev/maintainer looks at their product and humans who use, or would use, their product – or contribute for that matter.
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upvoteby dagurp2 hours ago|
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so which one do you use and why?
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upvoteby sumedh3 hours ago|
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Ghostty UX feels more polished compared to Kitty. I tried Kitty for a while but just did not like the default UX.
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upvoteby zaphirplane2 hours ago|
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The default theme / fonts / colors are a lot more esthetically pleasing combination, that’s likely why you think it’s more polished ?

I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts

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upvoteby asdfsa321 hours ago|
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To the point that Ghosty and all other new terms are just catching up with kitty. Ghosty is celebware and will likely die away once the author loses interest, despite the flame.
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upvoteby fock26 minutes ago|
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hey, on X I read that MH has a lot of collaborators working on it (when making fun of Anti-AI stances) - looked at the repo: <5 people <5% of commits.
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upvoteby ArchD2 hours ago|
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Kitty renders some icons badly but ghostty doesn't. In a nutshell, kitty takes some rendering shortcuts that cause the bad rendering:

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/docs/faq.rst...

People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.

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upvoteby jcgl1 hours ago|
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I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as Kitty "taking rendering shortcuts." Is this what you're referring to?

> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.

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upvoteby ArchD1 hours ago|
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I'm not familiar with the legal technicalities around Unicode and fonts to say whether it is the fonts' fault or kitty's fault, but as a user, I see bad rendering (some icon glyphs rendered too small) in kitty but not in ghostty for icon fonts that I don't think are all that obscure.
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upvoteby azuanrb2 hours ago|
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UI-wise, I kinda like Ghostty more. It feels slightly more polished. However, I've moved to Kitty mainly because of its native session support. The only way to have sessions in Ghostty is through a multiplexer, which I'm not a fan of anymore.
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upvoteby TheRoque3 hours ago|
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I haven't try Ghostty, but what I like about kitty is that it's performant, easy to customize (often it's just one line to add and you get that new feature you want), I like their defaults for tabs, layouts. It's not overwhelming but not too minimal either. I just find it's a sweet spot. I also somehow like the personality of the maintainer which seem to have a nice vision for the project. My major gripe is that it's not available on windows, but anyways I rarely use microslop products nowadays.
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upvoteby paaloeye2 hours ago|
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AFAIK, Ghostty is as performant. At least, on macOS. I used both and didn't see much difference. Decided to go with Ghostty as it feels more native than Kitty.
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upvoteby TheRoque1 hours ago|
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Yeah from what I've seen Ghostty is slightly more performant but they are both very performant.
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upvoteby mstaoru1 hours ago|
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How does a non-performant terminal look? I don't think I've even seen one.

Serious question.

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upvoteby TheRoque1 hours ago|
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Print a massive log file in kitty/ghostty, and another one with you default terminal, and you'll see a massive difference in how fast the log is printed out. Well to be honest it's just comfort, I can't claim it makes a difference in actual productivity, for me the real benefits of kitty are just the terminal multiplexer-ish capabilities (panes, sessions), other rendering niceties like adjusting the font, or having smooth scroll, sensible default shortcuts. But the actual "performance" e.g. input lag or rendering lag, I don't think it's that important.
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upvoteby XYen0n1 hours ago|
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I have previously seen programs run much more slowly when launched from the built-in terminal in a JetBrains IDE because log output was blocked.
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upvoteby devsda1 hours ago|
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iterm2. When there's heavy logging, I've seen it lag. Doesn't feel as snappy as Kitty.
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upvoteby flohofwoe3 hours ago|
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Very similar, about the only difference from user perspective is that Kitty has a slight content 'wobble' on macOS when resizing the window (this typically happens when the content is rendered via an MTKView or CAMetalLayer and its parent view's 'layerContentsPlacement' isn't anchored to one side during window resizing). That would be trivial to fix though.

PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).

TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.

Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

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upvoteby darkwater2 hours ago|
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> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".

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upvoteby flohofwoe2 hours ago|
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Maybe, but it reminds me of the bad old days when Microsoft called their applications 'cross-platform', and then they just meant different flavours of Windows ;)
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upvoteby darkwater1 hours ago|
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I mean, I share the sentiment, and IMO they should support at least the BSDs (there are official FreeBSD ports for both Kitty and Ghostty but no mentions of them in both websites)
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upvoteby devsda1 hours ago|
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> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows

Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D

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upvoteby paaloeye2 hours ago|
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Proper Windows support is not easy to archive. Plus with Windows Terminal being good enough and open-source, there isn't much incentive to support it.
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upvoteby flohofwoe2 hours ago|
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Windows Terminal doesn't support Kitty Graphics Protocol (yet?: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389).

That's the one thing I always check first in a terminal because I have this pet project to run emulators in a terminal ;)

https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty

(works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)

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upvoteby paaloeye2 hours ago|
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Honestly, as fun as it is using KGP, I don't consider it critical for any real use cases.

If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.

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upvoteby cumshitpiss3 hours ago|
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[dead]
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