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Comment by jcgl | Hacker News Reader

> Kitty I don't remember why I rejected.

Maybe worth another look at then? I'm far from a Kitty power user, but it does pretty much everything else I want it to, including working as a quake-style terminal[0]. And you can extend it with kittens[1] if you so desire. Also, the next release should presumably include smooth scrolling[2] which I'm quite looking forward to.

Maybe more than any one feature though, I appreciate the hard work that Kovid (the creator of Kitty) has done to tastefully add new VT standards and try to make terminals as useful as they can be in the 21st century.

[0] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/quick-access-termina...

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens_intro/

[2] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/9330

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Kitty is the best one. It has several features which have proven so useful I wasn't able to stay on anything else for more than a couple of hours (including the one this topic is about).

Ctrl+Shift+G wraps the output of the previous command into a pager (say, less). You often only know you needed a pager after that output is printed.

Ctrl+Shift+E highlights all links on the current screen and assigns short alphanumeric codes to them, so you can open links without using the mouse. For example, `Ctrl+Shift+E 1` opens the first link, `.. 2` the second one, etc.

Ctrl+Shift+U opens symbol search where you can find & insert symbols using their unicode names. Emoji, TUI blocks, rare accented characters you need once in a blue moon, CJK ideographs, whatever.

These small quality-of-life features make a big difference. In my terminal (TerminalNexus, Windows) I added per-tab session colors - click a palette icon, pick a color, and the terminal background and tab header change for that session. Simple but it's saved me from running commands in the wrong environment more than once.

Kitty is great, but its author has very strong opinions, strongly held; this keeps a number of popular requests summarily rejected. In particular, there is no way to color plain bold text, which is possible in basically any other emulator. This is a deal-breaker for me personally, it makes reading e.g. man pages unnecessarily hard.

WezTerm is a very good replacement.

> author has very strong opinions.

So true. To the point I have to maintain my own fork to make the command key my meta

Out of curiosity, what is the reason given to not color plain bold text ?

I'm not the GP, but I do remember why I rejected Kitty when I tried several terminal emulators last years: it broke quite a few of my workflows.

For instance, in vim the F3 key was broken[^1]. It was very surprising and weird, and a portable workaround required some arcane vim configuration.

Another important pain point was that the font rendering was different in Kitty to any other app, and very dependent on the screen DPI. IIRC, for a DPI around 100, I had to switch to "legacy rendering" because the default rendering was barely readable.

I also remember issues with SSH. And Kitty crashed at least once. And I wasn't a fan of Kitty's mix of C and Python. After a week or two of usage, my Kitty config file was big, with an extra hundred lines of Python for the tabbar. Despite some nice features (like the shortcut to put the output of the last command into a file), I got uneasy with all this mess. I tried Ghostty, which was as good as Kitty with much less oddities.

[^1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/13328

Kitty is the GOAT terminal

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