Both projects have different philosophies, alacritty devs are reluctant to add new features while kitty is flooded with features and yet faster than alacritty.
@@rochr4 or have a look into NOCACHE(1) NOCACHE(1) NAME nocache - don't use Linux page cache on given command SYNOPSIS nocache [-n ] command [argument...]
@` this clearly shows how irrelevant these differences are ...even at tree-ing the whole system the difference between gpu-accelerated and not are really small, 10-20%? I m using alacritty so I m playing devil's advocate here, but I think it doesnt really matter in day to day use ....I was forced to use st for a month and honestly didnt notice (st doesnt use gpu). What actually matters are features (or lack there of). I absolutely love how alacritty config works, how it applies changes to running instances. Features are what actually makes the difference, not fractions of seconds (or few seconds in absurd use cases)
In my experience, the point of tabs and splits are very useful when administering lots of servers from a jumpstation that you need to use (at least that's the case where I work)...but then it's ususally not an option to install Kitty so I go with tmux. Thanks for a nice video.
I use st / kitty / Alacritty and WezTerm for different reasons. st has blazing fast startup time. I have a pretty old rig: Phenom 9550 / 4G DDR2-800 so Alacritty takes about 7 to 10 seconds to start on my machine it's very slow. st takes 2-3 seconds. In terms of rendering Alacritty is considerably faster so when I need a terminal for coding I use Alacritty. Kitty on the other hand has a different font shaping code so fonts look differently (better or worse is a matter of preference). I terms of speed it's slightly faster than Alacritty in both startup time and rendering speed. WezTerm is a marvel! It is implemented in Rust and it's GPU-based similar to Alacritty but it has significantly better font shaping code (I like the way it renders fonts better), it has suport for OTF options like: ligatures on/off, zero with dot or slashed, you can choose it in the config if your font supports it (FiraCode and Adobe Code Pro both do) but the terminal requires to have Xorg Composite option enabled which affects my performance and triggers a bug in nVidia drivers which randomly halts my system. WezTerm supports images too but it uses a different protocol incompatible to kitty. so for modern systems I definitely recommend WezTerm it's a way better terminal than Alacritty even so Alacritty itself is a wonderful one. kitty has heavy python dependencies but it is blazing fast still. You can add an alias icat='/usr/bin/kitty +kitten icat' to save yourself some keystrokes.
Hey DT ! Lol Just wanted to let you know that you are with Chris Titus the main reason why I'm running linux and dumped windows and proprietary poo as you like to say. From Montreal Quebec thank you and keep up the good work
I've been using Kitty for several months now. Really, just stumbled on it one day and tried it. Works well in Fedora and it's now my default terminal there. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work in Debian Stable (but I didn't try that hard). Thanks for going over some of the features, which I haven't taken the time to explore.
I love this terminal, but the font rendering is really weird I use the UbuntuMono Nerd Fonts, and no matter what setting I put, the letters are always rendered weirdly, glued one to the other, and, it's just weird, as of Alacritty, it handles it perfectly fine without tweaking anything [ EDIT ] Fixed it! I just needed to enter the ENTIRE font names and settings, see here : font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font bold_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Bold italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Italic bold_italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Bold ^ This wasn't good What I needed to do is that v font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Regular bold_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Bold italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Italic bold_italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Bold
the way to build extensions (kittens) is a very cool feature in kitty because you only need to know python and this brings to kitty a lot of libs and opportunities i think we will see a lot of cool stuff in the future
2 questions, unrelated to Kitty but from this vid: - What window manager and hotkeys allows that tiling? 17:50 - What app is generating the random ascii art?
For those not using a tiling window manager (raising hand) this Kitty does indeed look compelling - and I admit I rather like the ability to see images right there in the text terminal. This would be the kind of rendering engine capability that I'd like to see with the Gemini web - text mode sensibilities rendered with ultra high performance but with the ability to render graphics image formats of various kinds
I think kitty output was cached whilst alacritty was not. You should try to benchmark it a couple more times. Also, kitty starts up slightly slower on my machine.
sold and i'm switched. thanks for the recommendation. on my spacevim, the config is nicely collapsed into sections by default as well. the tab system is good too you can do normal clickable tabs with super+shift+t and close them with super+shift+q
Also the `time tree /` is not fair because the first time it is run , tree takes more time. Run it once and then it has the files indexed, and run the tests after that. Here are the results I got : Alacritty : 86796 directories, 1141900 files real 0m6.815s user 0m3.719s sys 0m3.081s Kitty : 86796 directories, 1141736 files real 0m7.737s user 0m3.735s sys 0m3.023s St : 86796 directories, 1142003 files real 0m6.581s user 0m3.617s sys 0m2.954s However , it is worth noting that st was sort of skipping over some content mid-rendering wheras both kitty and alacritty were rendering the tree smoothly throughout. The only difference in "GPU acceleration" is how fast the text is rendered on screen , not how fast the program is run
I've been using a terminal emulator called wezterm for a while. I like it a lot but haven't seen much people use it. it's kinda similar concept, but the config is written in lua, which might be nice for some
@@joelchrono Ligatures are special characters that form by combining two other characters, in these case ligatures would only show for aesthetic purposes, like when you have "->", that'll form an arrow, or triple equals would show up like a normal equal sign but with one added line on time instead of showing "===".
Doing tree on root the second time may be faster because of the filesystem cache, having a program that print 10000 lines of random characters should be a better test.
I have used alacritty with tmux in the past but I recently transitioned to kitty and I am more than impressed. Here to stay! Tmux is in some sense an architectural smell, especially when used only for terminal multiplexing. It is an additional layer on top of the terminal emulator that redirects every character that is ever sent to the terminal... negating in part the speed benefits that the developers of Alacritty and Kitty work so hard to achieve.
unfortunately kitty hasnt been so nice for me. Resizing it is very buggy on bspwm on my machine.. I can configure it just fine but it just messes with my workflow
The startup time on these terminal emulators is really a dealbreaker for me. In my workflow I open and close terminals all the time in DWM. So start time is for me way more important then rendering.
Just did a test running "time tree /" in both Kitty and my own st build. The time are virtually the same, multiple runs makes both being fastest in turns, differnce usually within the .1 s. So, at least on my laptop, kitty doesn't seem to be faster than st running this test. I saw that st's output also had colouring while Kitty didn't (this was an unconfigured Kitty). I don't have a big GPU, only the default Intel one, so maybe Kitty cannot make full advantage of the GPU acceleration, but I think the speed of these emulators is a bit overblown. Still have to test Alacritty though, maybe it fares better. BTW, never count the first time as that one takes longer. It seems to build up cache first after which the command is a whole lot faster.
4th, totally installing it right now, also apparently openSUSE has the default config elsewhere. turns out openSUSE doesn;t package kitty.conf anywhere, it looks like they point kitty to read .Xresources
@@DistroTube Mildly, honestly been on opensuse for a while and the distro is proving... frustrating with the changes they make to the packages. I got too used to Fedora/Debian where they dont touch the defaults.
Inspired by this video I did a quick benchmark using "time find /" in alacritty, tilix, and gnome terminal. I realized that if I'm using tmux there is no difference! I dug a little deeper, found "vtebench" for a better profiling and learned that if you are using Alacritty to be "FASTER" then "DO NOT USE TMUX". I read throught this whole thread: github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/2587 and it turns out that a better option for multiplexing is using a tiling window manager and avoiding tmux. otherwise there is no point in using Alacritty. Just use the default gnome terminal and tmux!
@BronzeKaiser Yeah it's not at all conclusive. The original dev of Alacritty did some benchmarks: jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ - but keep in mind that those don't take latency into account.
@BronzeKaiser No kitty isnt fast. Look your example (time tree /) in my computer: 1. st (suckless aka simple terminal) -> 3.455sec 2. alacritty -> 3.590sec 3. termite -> 5.001sec 4. kitty -> 7.025sec(!) Kitty is the slowest...
Just as a side not the timing on the end is not super precise. I timed my alacritty several times and on the first run it was 16s but on the second and third it was only 9s, and then both runs of kitty were about 11s. There is probably some caching that occurs which is why the first run is slower than others, so (in my case at least) kitty is actually slower.
I had a problem with the backspace not working right with kitty when using ssh to connect to a Raspberry Pi. I figured out that installing kitty-terminfo on the Raspberry Pi fixed the problem.
I do use a tiling window manager and I truly need multiplexing terminals with it also. Depends on your needs and what you are doing with your computer I guess :D
I noticed latency on both alacritty and doom Emacs. Had to switch back to st terminal. They are fast in terms of throughput but they do have delay while typing. Annoying in vim especially
I like that it doesnt come with a weird terminal theme like Alacritty. It's a pain in the ass to just make Alacritty look normal, editing config files (or borking it using that janky theming program for it)
Sometimes I feel like you say stuff just to hear yourself talk or extend your video time. overall you channel is ok, though, I do respect your opinion and reviews
I'm sticking to Alacritty since Kitty doesn't support IME unfortunately (it supports ibus, but I use fcitx), would love to use it if that feature gets implemented.
IME is an input method to write some languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I personally use it to write Japanese. These writing systems are different from English, a letter could have multiple forms (like a combination of some letters create a new one). They can also sound the same but they could be different when they're written; hence the need of IME. It's like an autocompletion popup, pretty much. Also, fcitx5 supports Kitty and I use Kitty now :D
I love that your channel is DistroTube but even though you check out Distros here and there, you're more or less comfortable staying on what works and hopping programs all the time. It's amazing how often I open up RUclips to find you've once again found a new favourite terminal/wm to customise exactly the same as all your other ones lmao. Keep it up DT.
I never understood all the hype for Alacritty personally. My build of ST is faster in every test I’ve tried... plus Alacritty doesn’t play well with pywal which is a dealbreaker for me. For example, if you open weechat and resize or float the window it breaks the colorscheme. I’ve reached out to the devs about this and they were aware of the issue and said it wouldn’t likely be fixed because of the way Alacritty draws colors. With all that said I’ve simply stuck with ST because it just does everything I want. (Except colored emojis)... Looks like I’ll have to take another look at Kitty though. Thanks Derek. 🙏🏻 Edit: I also don’t like the way Alacritty draws fonts... it seems so wide to me. I’ve played with the X and Y scaling but could never get it to look the way other terminals look out of the box. 🤷🏻♂️
Hi Derek! First I want to thank you for videos, enjoying and learning a lot from your content. I'm curious about the terminal color schemes you used in this video, for kitty and alacritty respectively, could you please share them?
Testing with 'tree': The first time you ran it in alacritty, your system cached some of the inode info. Kitty might be faster, but I suspect the caching interfered with the test by making the second run quicker regardless of the terminal used.
I don’t know why in the world do we need So many terminal emulators? It’s so confusing to find the right one for oneself. I need a terminal supports true color but still hang on default Apple terminal because i don’t know which one to replace it.
The Unix philosophy should be a general guideline, not an absolute rule. Some things can effectively pull off doing multiple things well at once and don't let Unix snobs tell you otherwise.
Interstingly seems to be Broken on debian testing because of some issue with opengl. I genuinely think it's the first time i see a program not working out of the box on testing.
I will not switch to kitty even if I am using alacrity and using tmux for multiplexing. When you ssh into a server and you need multiplexing you need to open a cheat sheet of tmux cause you will not remeber the keybindings. I rather take the inconvinience that a stand alone terminal multiplexer crates than remember another set of key binding
Kitty's multiplexing is way better than Alacritty+Tmux for couple of reasons: 1) Currently it is not possible to edit a text file in Vim running in a Tmux split in Alacritty without awful mouse flickering if there is a log file printing in another split. This does not happen in Kitty, the mouse does not flicker in another split when something is printing in the other. 2) The native screen multiplexing support is way better idea than Tmux, as Tmux is a 3rd application that runs between host applications and terminals, is known to cause slowness, and not optimized for a particular terminal. Am not sure why people don't know of Kitty!
@@user-he4ef9br7z Update: I should actually delete that comment, as tmux now has the Sync option and there is no flickering so 1) is no longer valid. I have moved completely to Alacritty+Tmux+NeoVim. Kitty developer does not wish to improve launch time of the application, and Alacritty opens blazing fast.
LOL I've been using kitty for the last 3 months because of the comments on your videos, also how about a video on top distros with a PURPOSE, i can think of arcoLinux that is somewhat of a platform to learn linux or AV-Linux that makes audio production in linux accessible to anyone , those came o mind but i´m sure inside the endless sea of linux distros there are some of them that actually serve a purpose and linux community would be missing them if they were to disappear
I'm still on urxvt and couldn't live without some of its perl extensions for keyboard select (using vi-style controls, of course) and keyboard copy / open url's. Can Kitty (or Alacritty) do that?
Hm, I've made this test several times (`time tree /home`, not `/` cause I also have a HDD mounted, so it would be slow) and Kitty got 2-2.3s, and my usual terminal - Konsole - 1.5-2s. So is Konsole faster after all?
*Calls other distros as bloat *has vim, nano and emacs installed *also kitty and alacritty is installed *also has bunch of other multiple stuff installed for the same purpose *still calls other distros as bloat -a typical arch user
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
We need the two projects to join forces Alakitty lol
nice to hear.. but both projects are of different codebase and tech stack..Good one :)
Both projects have different philosophies, alacritty devs are reluctant to add new features while kitty is flooded with features and yet faster than alacritty.
@@PurhanKaushik this was a joke lol
@@PurhanKaushik Speed of execution it's not dependant on the size of the program
@@tokiomutex4148 Did I ever say that?
Kitty was created by the author of the Calibre e-book manager which is also a top-notch software.
Now I have to give it a try, I can't live with out calibre
too bad it's written also in python
@@rationalityfirst why the hate ??
@@therealslimaddy because python is a mess
@@rationalityfirst care to explain why ?
14:27 note that linux may cache the directories and files when you run tree so its faster when you run the same command the second time, in kitty.
yes, clean boot, re-test ;)
I was thinking this could be possible too. Either way I would say kitty is as fast as Alacrity. GPU acceleration can not be understated.
I ran `tree /` once to populate the cache than I timed it in Alacrity and Kitty. There was no difference on my machine (less than 0.1%).
@@rochr4
or have a look into
NOCACHE(1)
NOCACHE(1)
NAME
nocache - don't use Linux page cache on given command
SYNOPSIS
nocache [-n ] command [argument...]
@` this clearly shows how irrelevant these differences are ...even at tree-ing the whole system the difference between gpu-accelerated and not are really small, 10-20%? I m using alacritty so I m playing devil's advocate here, but I think it doesnt really matter in day to day use ....I was forced to use st for a month and honestly didnt notice (st doesnt use gpu). What actually matters are features (or lack there of). I absolutely love how alacritty config works, how it applies changes to running instances. Features are what actually makes the difference, not fractions of seconds (or few seconds in absurd use cases)
DT: It may be faster, it may be slower, that really doesn't mean much.
Also DT: Alacritty is fast, but Kitty is faster!
In my experience, the point of tabs and splits are very useful when administering lots of servers from a jumpstation that you need to use (at least that's the case where I work)...but then it's ususally not an option to install Kitty so I go with tmux. Thanks for a nice video.
I started using kitty to display images in vifm the easy way and I'm loving it
How?
@@sklorpion with a kitten. There is an article in Medium about how to show images in the terminal with kitty.
I use st / kitty / Alacritty and WezTerm for different reasons. st has blazing fast startup time. I have a pretty old rig: Phenom 9550 / 4G DDR2-800 so Alacritty takes about 7 to 10 seconds to start on my machine it's very slow. st takes 2-3 seconds. In terms of rendering Alacritty is considerably faster so when I need a terminal for coding I use Alacritty.
Kitty on the other hand has a different font shaping code so fonts look differently (better or worse is a matter of preference). I terms of speed it's slightly faster than Alacritty in both startup time and rendering speed.
WezTerm is a marvel! It is implemented in Rust and it's GPU-based similar to Alacritty but it has significantly better font shaping code (I like the way it renders fonts better), it has suport for OTF options like: ligatures on/off, zero with dot or slashed, you can choose it in the config if your font supports it (FiraCode and Adobe Code Pro both do) but the terminal requires to have Xorg Composite option enabled which affects my performance and triggers a bug in nVidia drivers which randomly halts my system. WezTerm supports images too but it uses a different protocol incompatible to kitty.
so for modern systems I definitely recommend WezTerm it's a way better terminal than Alacritty even so Alacritty itself is a wonderful one.
kitty has heavy python dependencies but it is blazing fast still. You can add an alias icat='/usr/bin/kitty +kitten icat' to save yourself some keystrokes.
Hey DT ! Lol Just wanted to let you know that you are with Chris Titus the main reason why I'm running linux and dumped windows and proprietary poo as you like to say. From Montreal Quebec thank you and keep up the good work
Chris Titus doesn't know what he's talking about.
I've been using Kitty for several months now. Really, just stumbled on it one day and tried it. Works well in Fedora and it's now my default terminal there. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work in Debian Stable (but I didn't try that hard). Thanks for going over some of the features, which I haven't taken the time to explore.
I love this terminal, but the font rendering is really weird
I use the UbuntuMono Nerd Fonts, and no matter what setting I put, the letters are always rendered weirdly, glued one to the other, and, it's just weird, as of Alacritty, it handles it perfectly fine without tweaking anything
[ EDIT ]
Fixed it!
I just needed to enter the ENTIRE font names and settings, see here :
font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font
bold_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Bold
italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Italic
bold_italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Bold
^ This wasn't good
What I needed to do is that v
font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Regular
bold_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Bold
italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Italic
bold_italic_font UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono Bold
Try this:
font_family UbuntuMono Nerd Font Mono
bold_font auto
italic_font auto
bold_italic_font auto
I've noticed this behaviour too and fixed it in the same way.
i was about to ask if you made sure it was monospaced. proud of u for figuring it out.
Tha lack of bitmap fonts in kitty is a no-no for me
@@GeorgiMinkov bitmap fonts looks bad everywhere. why you want them?
the way to build extensions (kittens) is a very cool feature in kitty because you only need to know python and this brings to kitty a lot of libs and opportunities i think we will see a lot of cool stuff in the future
You don't need example config file. Just press ctrl+shift+f2 in kitty. And it'll open confing in your default editor
I started using Kitty the moment I switched to Arch and wanted to display an image on neofetch, lol.
And ligatures as another comment suggests. I forgot about that.
@Gabifuertes I switched to Kitty from Konsole in Manjaro KDE. The experience has been outstanding compared to competitors.
hmmm why do people use neofetch?
@@prgnify it's fancy
Link clicking with ctrl + shift + e is one of my favorite keyboard friendly kitty features. Kitty diff is also super nice for looking at git commits
“For looking at git commits” pls elaborate, ty. Curious what it does well.
2 questions, unrelated to Kitty but from this vid:
- What window manager and hotkeys allows that tiling? 17:50
- What app is generating the random ascii art?
Kitty was developed by Kovid Goyal (Indian). Who also built calibre e-book manager
Another great video DT, Kitty default.conf at 1000 lines isn't too bad considering squid default.conf has 7980 lines but most is comments as well.
For those not using a tiling window manager (raising hand) this Kitty does indeed look compelling - and I admit I rather like the ability to see images right there in the text terminal. This would be the kind of rendering engine capability that I'd like to see with the Gemini web - text mode sensibilities rendered with ultra high performance but with the ability to render graphics image formats of various kinds
I think kitty output was cached whilst alacritty was not. You should try to benchmark it a couple more times.
Also, kitty starts up slightly slower on my machine.
I really enjoyed watching this video, learned a lot! Thanks, I'm using Kitty because of tab management feature
sold and i'm switched. thanks for the recommendation. on my spacevim, the config is nicely collapsed into sections by default as well. the tab system is good too you can do normal clickable tabs with super+shift+t and close them with super+shift+q
Never heard of spacevim - this looks glorious! Will check.
Favorite features?
I knew Kitty last year , and yes absolutly I loved it
what a coincidence, I just switched to Kitty yesterday, mostly for the splitting thing, but also it's blazing fast
Kitty is perfect terminal for me.. its fast, shows images, ligatures
Also the `time tree /` is not fair because the first time it is run , tree takes more time. Run it once and then it has the files indexed, and run the tests after that.
Here are the results I got :
Alacritty :
86796 directories, 1141900 files
real 0m6.815s
user 0m3.719s
sys 0m3.081s
Kitty :
86796 directories, 1141736 files
real 0m7.737s
user 0m3.735s
sys 0m3.023s
St :
86796 directories, 1142003 files
real 0m6.581s
user 0m3.617s
sys 0m2.954s
However , it is worth noting that st was sort of skipping over some content mid-rendering wheras both kitty and alacritty were rendering the tree smoothly throughout.
The only difference in "GPU acceleration" is how fast the text is rendered on screen , not how fast the program is run
having to restart the terminal after changing anything in the config feels like so much pain after using alacritty for a while
Yeah. And I noticed it uses a lot more resources and is slower to start up, especially noticeable on hard drives and lower-specs machines
The docs mention right away (now, at least) that ctrl+shift+f5 reloads from the config, but it’d be nice if it did it automatically imo.
That was suggested over reddit. Very cool you made a video about it.
I've been using a terminal emulator called wezterm for a while. I like it a lot but haven't seen much people use it.
it's kinda similar concept, but the config is written in lua, which might be nice for some
It takes 277 MB on my machine. Too much for me, but it's look good.
7:03 Ctrl+Shift+F5 to reload config in kitty
i installed kitty, with Awesome and a pacman theme-bar, looks beautiful
I love kitty changed from alacritty to it the second i saw it has ligtatures
This is little controversial I think, I do like ligatures a lot
What are ligatures? I am kinda new on that
@@joelchrono Ligatures are special characters that form by combining two other characters, in these case ligatures would only show for aesthetic purposes, like when you have "->", that'll form an arrow, or triple equals would show up like a normal equal sign but with one added line on time instead of showing "===".
@@joelchrono Ligature is mostly for programming, for example, if your font supports ligature, when you type
Yap, like me.
I'll rethink of using alacrity when they finally add ligatures.
Where are you getting the Star Wars block text art stuff in the terminal??
I noticed when you opened and closed alacritty that a small animation occurred. Where did that come from? Picom?
ruclips.net/video/DzVgr0mxBfI/видео.html
@@DistroTube
I had no idea there was a picom fork with animations. Very cool.
Doing tree on root the second time may be faster because of the filesystem cache, having a program that print 10000 lines of random characters should be a better test.
I have used alacritty with tmux in the past but I recently transitioned to kitty and I am more than impressed. Here to stay! Tmux is in some sense an architectural smell, especially when used only for terminal multiplexing. It is an additional layer on top of the terminal emulator that redirects every character that is ever sent to the terminal... negating in part the speed benefits that the developers of Alacritty and Kitty work so hard to achieve.
unfortunately kitty hasnt been so nice for me. Resizing it is very buggy on bspwm on my machine.. I can configure it just fine but it just messes with my workflow
@@ardishco Have you tried installing the latest version from the website instead of using the ones supplied by distro package managers?
Found kitty a while ago, been loving it ever since.
The startup time on these terminal emulators is really a dealbreaker for me. In my workflow I open and close terminals all the time in DWM. So start time is for me way more important then rendering.
Just did a test running "time tree /" in both Kitty and my own st build. The time are virtually the same, multiple runs makes both being fastest in turns, differnce usually within the .1 s. So, at least on my laptop, kitty doesn't seem to be faster than st running this test. I saw that st's output also had colouring while Kitty didn't (this was an unconfigured Kitty). I don't have a big GPU, only the default Intel one, so maybe Kitty cannot make full advantage of the GPU acceleration, but I think the speed of these emulators is a bit overblown. Still have to test Alacritty though, maybe it fares better. BTW, never count the first time as that one takes longer. It seems to build up cache first after which the command is a whole lot faster.
You can use single instance mode to reduce the startup time of new instances: sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/invocation.html#cmdoption-kitty-single-instance
DT, dammit, I just patched st to my liking, giving me a perfect terminal experience, but now I have to go check this out.
St is much faster than kitty, when try time tree / command
The best tech enthusiasts channel on RUclips.
Switched from Alacritty to Kitty for ligatures (Alacritty will basically never have ligature support), haven’t looked back.
Nice icat feature love that one
Going to install on my work machine (MacBook)
I love kitty. Glad its getting more attention
You're scaring me, after I just installed kitty, I went to check RUclips, and you just updated this video
@@criticalsoft He knows our thoughts, he walks our minds...
4th, totally installing it right now, also apparently openSUSE has the default config elsewhere.
turns out openSUSE doesn;t package kitty.conf anywhere, it looks like they point kitty to read .Xresources
I think you'll be impressed with it.
@@DistroTube Mildly, honestly been on opensuse for a while and the distro is proving... frustrating with the changes they make to the packages. I got too used to Fedora/Debian where they dont touch the defaults.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@nevoyu Try Arch-based OS such as Manjaro, you are going to love it.
@@DistroTube just thought I'd share still using kitty though I don't use tabs or multiplexing....
Thanks for your videos. Please consider having timestamps, they really help!
Inspired by this video I did a quick benchmark using "time find /" in alacritty, tilix, and gnome terminal. I realized that if I'm using tmux there is no difference!
I dug a little deeper, found "vtebench" for a better profiling and learned that if you are using Alacritty to be "FASTER" then "DO NOT USE TMUX".
I read throught this whole thread: github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/2587 and it turns out that a better option for multiplexing is using a tiling window manager and avoiding tmux. otherwise there is no point in using Alacritty. Just use the default gnome terminal and tmux!
I think I've found my new terminal emulator
alacritty doesnt have ligature support, minus a version in the aur thats 2 versions behind
Faster than Alacritty, what kind of sorcery is this. Thats the first time I have seen a terminal emulator claim that. This makes me want to try it
Nothing in this video supports that claim. He didn't even do proper benchmarks.
@BronzeKaiser Yeah it's not at all conclusive. The original dev of Alacritty did some benchmarks: jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ - but keep in mind that those don't take latency into account.
@BronzeKaiser No kitty isnt fast. Look your example (time tree /) in my computer:
1. st (suckless aka simple terminal) -> 3.455sec
2. alacritty -> 3.590sec
3. termite -> 5.001sec
4. kitty -> 7.025sec(!)
Kitty is the slowest...
if i wanted to use kitty in dwm as a scratchpad instead of st? what would be the proper way to lauch it in a 50x20 sized scratchpad?
you can reload kitty theme by CTRL-SHIFT-F5
meow
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just as a side not the timing on the end is not super precise. I timed my alacritty several times and on the first run it was 16s but on the second and third it was only 9s, and then both runs of kitty were about 11s. There is probably some caching that occurs which is why the first run is slower than others, so (in my case at least) kitty is actually slower.
I had a problem with the backspace not working right with kitty when using ssh to connect to a Raspberry Pi. I figured out that installing kitty-terminfo on the Raspberry Pi fixed the problem.
I changed text color from the config file , but how can i change bold text color and use different colors etc.
I do use a tiling window manager and I truly need multiplexing terminals with it also. Depends on your needs and what you are doing with your computer I guess :D
How do you achive those transitions
when window opens\closes?
It's a picom fork, he has a video about it.
what happened to unfettered freedom? :(
@@____-gy5mq No idea what "unfettered freedom" is, but that made me laugh
I noticed latency on both alacritty and doom Emacs. Had to switch back to st terminal. They are fast in terms of throughput but they do have delay while typing. Annoying in vim especially
I like that it doesnt come with a weird terminal theme like Alacritty. It's a pain in the ass to just make Alacritty look normal, editing config files (or borking it using that janky theming program for it)
what is the main difference between kitty vs alacritty?
DT how do you get that logo are art when you atart alacrity or kitty(the six , crunchybag, jango fett) one.
Sometimes I feel like you say stuff just to hear yourself talk or extend your video time. overall you channel is ok, though, I do respect your opinion and reviews
I'm sticking to Alacritty since Kitty doesn't support IME unfortunately (it supports ibus, but I use fcitx), would love to use it if that feature gets implemented.
Can you elaborate on this a little more? I do not know about IME (or what it stands for) and would like to understand why that is important to you
IME is an input method to write some languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I personally use it to write Japanese. These writing systems are different from English, a letter could have multiple forms (like a combination of some letters create a new one). They can also sound the same but they could be different when they're written; hence the need of IME. It's like an autocompletion popup, pretty much.
Also, fcitx5 supports Kitty and I use Kitty now :D
@@elianiva Thank you for explaining this! Appreciate it.
I use xterm, never disappointed me through the years.
Use st then.
I tried st, alacritty, and kitty, and st was sooooo much smoother and faster
st is pretty fast, until I open my 2000 lines code file in vim, that forced me to switch to alacritty.
@@netbotcl586 doesn't lag for me, i've opened a file with 500 thousand of the letter j in st and no lag at all
Thanks for the video.
I love that your channel is DistroTube but even though you check out Distros here and there, you're more or less comfortable staying on what works and hopping programs all the time. It's amazing how often I open up RUclips to find you've once again found a new favourite terminal/wm to customise exactly the same as all your other ones lmao. Keep it up DT.
I guess he likes to tinker then?
I never understood all the hype for Alacritty personally. My build of ST is faster in every test I’ve tried... plus Alacritty doesn’t play well with pywal which is a dealbreaker for me. For example, if you open weechat and resize or float the window it breaks the colorscheme. I’ve reached out to the devs about this and they were aware of the issue and said it wouldn’t likely be fixed because of the way Alacritty draws colors.
With all that said I’ve simply stuck with ST because it just does everything I want. (Except colored emojis)... Looks like I’ll have to take another look at Kitty though.
Thanks Derek. 🙏🏻
Edit: I also don’t like the way Alacritty draws fonts... it seems so wide to me. I’ve played with the X and Y scaling but could never get it to look the way other terminals look out of the box. 🤷🏻♂️
Alacrity is written in rust. Full stop. only thing that matters. If the alternative isn't written in rust it isn't an alternative.
@@MichaelMantion So you only use software exclusively written in Rust?
Hi Derek! First I want to thank you for videos, enjoying and learning a lot from your content. I'm curious about the terminal color schemes you used in this video, for kitty and alacritty respectively, could you please share them?
DT, you could also try foot terminal :)
How is the emoji support in kitty?
Hi, what os you are using ??
I tried it but the scrolling sucks, it only scrolls by line instead of by pixel, which is really annoying when using a touchpad
what is your tiling window manager though?
Testing with 'tree': The first time you ran it in alacritty, your system cached some of the inode info. Kitty might be faster, but I suspect the caching interfered with the test by making the second run quicker regardless of the terminal used.
Agree, the first time to run tree command takes longer time.
Hey DT! Could you do a video looking at Privacy and Security OS? Like Whonix, QubesOS, Linux Kadachi or Tails? Really want to hear your opinion ^_^
Hey DT, can you overview finch?
I don’t know why in the world do we need So many terminal emulators? It’s so confusing to find the right one for oneself. I need a terminal supports true color but still hang on default Apple terminal because i don’t know which one to replace it.
>using Apple
Isn’t this missing the Unix philosophy and trending towards monolithic design issues like systemd? Looks nice though.
Suckless fanboys will be triggered by this. :D
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Unix philosophy should be a general guideline, not an absolute rule. Some things can effectively pull off doing multiple things well at once and don't let Unix snobs tell you otherwise.
hey dt can you make a video about setting up your display manager (LightDM)
Another advantage is Kitty is in the debian repo, because alacritty is a real pain in the ass to install on Debian.
Interstingly seems to be Broken on debian testing because of some issue with opengl. I genuinely think it's the first time i see a program not working out of the box on testing.
Bugs seems to be almost 2 years old. Huh.
bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=897381
Hello @DistoTube, would you please share your tilingManager config file?
what is the window manager you are using? i3wm?
Xmonad
I installed kitty first and then tried alacrity, for my needs kitty was better, so I stay with it.
One question I have about kitty, how do I enable bold is bright option in kitty?
been using it since i jumped to manjaro about 2 years ago
Could you please share your kitty.conf file?
I will not switch to kitty even if I am using alacrity and using tmux for multiplexing. When you ssh into a server and you need multiplexing you need to open a cheat sheet of tmux cause you will not remeber the keybindings. I rather take the inconvinience that a stand alone terminal multiplexer crates than remember another set of key binding
Kitty's multiplexing is way better than Alacritty+Tmux for couple of reasons:
1) Currently it is not possible to edit a text file in Vim running in a Tmux split in Alacritty without awful mouse flickering if there is a log file printing in another split. This does not happen in Kitty, the mouse does not flicker in another split when something is printing in the other.
2) The native screen multiplexing support is way better idea than Tmux, as Tmux is a 3rd application that runs between host applications and terminals, is known to cause slowness, and not optimized for a particular terminal.
Am not sure why people don't know of Kitty!
You can use tmux over ssh. Also there's the ability to detach and run tmux in the background.
@@user-he4ef9br7z Update: I should actually delete that comment, as tmux now has the Sync option and there is no flickering so 1) is no longer valid. I have moved completely to Alacritty+Tmux+NeoVim. Kitty developer does not wish to improve launch time of the application, and Alacritty opens blazing fast.
@@namesame I'd say keep the comment. Might be helpful to someone scrolling by.🤷♂️
What if you could use images in emacs in Kitty? How hard would it be to implement that, I wonder?
if Kitty had the handy window management of Terminator it would appeal to most users imo
I actually like the "bald font"...
LOL I've been using kitty for the last 3 months because of the comments on your videos,
also how about a video on top distros with a PURPOSE, i can think of arcoLinux that is somewhat of a platform to learn linux or AV-Linux that makes audio production in linux accessible to anyone , those came o mind but i´m sure inside the endless sea of linux distros there are some of them that actually serve a purpose and linux community would be missing them if they were to disappear
I'm still on urxvt and couldn't live without some of its perl extensions for keyboard select (using vi-style controls, of course) and keyboard copy / open url's. Can Kitty (or Alacritty) do that?
Hm, I've made this test several times (`time tree /home`, not `/` cause I also have a HDD mounted, so it would be slow) and Kitty got 2-2.3s, and my usual terminal - Konsole - 1.5-2s. So is Konsole faster after all?
Kitty is a nice terminal, but the lack of font smoothing really makes it unusable for me.
For diffs, nothing beats “beyond compare” in my experience. Nothing beats that name, either…
*Calls other distros as bloat
*has vim, nano and emacs installed
*also kitty and alacritty is installed
*also has bunch of other multiple stuff installed for the same purpose
*still calls other distros as bloat
-a typical arch user
At least he admitted that his system is bloated in the vid
He has all that stuff because he needs to explore stuff to make videos.