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Comment by yewenjie | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare with Alacritty?

Alacritty has fewer features (by design) i think. Alacritty is more supposed to be used with something like screen or tmux while Kitty has tabs, splits and so on.

My understanding with Alacritty is that functionality like tabs would be up to downstream software to implement. So I create a new project called "UltraAwesomeTerminal" and use Alacritty as a library.

Is that accurate? I'm kind of unsure.

Our position is that tabs is the job for your window manager. I, for example, run `i3` which makes implementing tabs in Alacritty a non-issue for me.

I use tabbed for Alacritty, it works in any WM.

https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/

Thanks for the reply! That makes sense. And sorry for the late response.

Alacritty doesn't have ligatures[1] support. I like the project and wish it success, it has a nice, clean code, somewhat minimalistic, and clear goals. But so far it lags behind kitty.

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

Alacritty + Starship is heaven

https://starship.rs/

There's simply no comparison. I wrote a program that prints mpeg videos to the terminal, and used it to stress test just about every terminal out there. Nothing goes faster and smoother than KiTTY. Alacritty is no exception; in my experience it had glitchy rendering for certain characters and lagged. The only terminals I've seen that come close to KiTTY in terms of textmode graphics performance and overall quality, are probably PuTTY, Gnome Terminal, and Terminal.app. The only bad thing I could say about KiTTY is it glitches for me on occasion when rendering Emacs windows side-by-side. See also https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/printvideo.html

Meanwhile I'd just use the framebuffer here with tmux, and a parallel tty with my $HOME/bin/fbplayer script:

    #!/bin/sh
    clear
    setterm -cursor off
    echo -en "\e]P0000000"
    mplayer -really-quiet -vo fbdev2 -vf scale=:-1 "$@"  
    setterm -cursor on
    echo -en "\e]P01d2229"
    clear

Add mailx, sacc, bollux, irssi, bitlbee, cmus, fbpdf2 and fim and I won't use X any more. Even mednafen and ScummVM work with

    export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon

Try it.

Do you have a browser? Clipboard? They're the things that keep me using X.

On browser: lynx and links work on HN. Not many sites. will work, but at least with links -g you'll have images in a second tty (I use the first one with tmux). And you'll get far less distractions.

Youtube: mplayer on tty2 + youtube-dl/streamlink/mpsyt.

Reddit: lynx gopher://gopherddit.com (r/o), tuir (r/w).

Clipboard: gpm. Crude, but it's something.

Personally when I tried both (I used a dozen of different terminal emulators to test them out and see which one I like the best) it boiled down to the fact that I had some test file for Unicode characters that Kitty (and I believe Sakura?) were the only terminals that could render it properly, Alacritty was second best but it was pretty broken. Other than that feature wise I didn't feel like either of them was missing anything (for my personal use case). Alacritty has a bit faster startup time though which can be noticable.

Which characters? Is this one of the common test files that float around, like the UNSCII one? Or a private one of your own?

It was just a bunch of Unicode characters that I picked at that time to test various terminal emulators, I'm not sure what was it specifically since it's been a while (and there's a chance that Alacritty works fine now), but likely some sort of emojis and Asian scripts.

It is a shame that you cannot remember, because I do keep my eye out for this sort of thing. If it's a font problem, then it's not that interesting to me. And most of the Unicode problems tend to be either (a) people erroneously assuming that "private use" is the same for everyone, or (b) the usual problem with code points that didn't have defined widths and suchlike in earlier versions of Unicode. But very occasionally there's something worth noting.

Alactrittys font rendering was always a bit different than the rest of my DE which causes it to look jarring. Haven't seen this issue with Kitty.

I liked Alacritty well enough, but it doesn't support ligatures. Kitty does, so that's what I use.

I went the same way, but in the long run kitty's startup delay of about half a second or more just felt too sluggish for me. Luckily st can now be patched for font ligature support, and it starts up ten times faster while I don't notice any performance difference in other cases; it seems GPU-based rendering in terminals is a bit overkill in the majority of applications.

Oh. I haven’t noticed any startup lag personally. I’ll give st a try and compare.

It supports tilde tabbing on osx

Perhaps run them both and let us know.

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