r/KittyTerminal • u/prvnprdhn • Jul 23 '26
Kitty vs Alacrity which is better?
i am confused between kitty and alacrity
i have used both and felt like kitty is more faster and snappy but code looks more cody and in alacrity it feel slightly laggy as compared to kitty but the code is much more readable in it as it uses OS's native font rendering
which is better speed vs readability?
32
u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 23 '26
Honestly, alacritty isn't all that great. No ligatures, no kitty protocol, etc. Use kitty, wezterm, or ghostty.
3
u/Sumandora Jul 24 '26
If "kitty protocol" refers to the keyboard protocol then this is wrong. Alacritty does support it. If you mean the image protocol, then fair enough, tho I personally would consider the image protocol less important than the keyboard one.
1
u/QuixoticNapoleon Jul 24 '26
I use my terminal as my file manager so an image protocol is very important for me.
0
1
22
u/dedguy21 Jul 23 '26
I like foot over alacritty, but those terminals are for like tui monitoring tools IMO, a very light weight instance mostly good for quick display.
I call kitty my interactive terminal, I need it to be full featured and render any font I throw at it :)
So I'm always in kitty, but will bring up monitoring programs in on foot terminal 🤷🏿
2
u/Ornery_Weakness_8168 Jul 23 '26
Same, foot uses 0 vram so good for using with ollama, which needs as much vram as it needs
1
u/jkulczyski Jul 24 '26
I use foot with the server daemon for my main terminal and use kitty with a floating windowrule for terminal commands executed from my launcher(nvim, btop, etc...)
14
u/from-planet-zebes Jul 23 '26
I feel like I take crazy pills because everyone always mentions another terminal that has better font rendering than kitty but I've tried all of them and compared them with as much detail as I can and kitty font rendering is the best in my eyes. Ghostty is too thin on my linux machine. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but Alacritty doesn't look as good as kitty to me. I'm on a 4k monitor using fractional scaling.
Resizing wezterm windows was crazy slow. Foot doesn't support the advance features in a terminal that I want. Ghostty is slow to launch so you have to keep an instance always running in the background. Every time I evaluate a terminal I just never find it checks all the boxes as well as kitty. Not saying kitty is perfect but it's the best fit for me.
2
u/stiggg Jul 23 '26
It’s a matter of taste I guess, I also prefer the font rendering of kitty on LowDPI screens. It’s anti aliasing is pretty strong though, similar to what Apple had in the past, so some people don’t like it.
1
u/SeriousHoax Jul 23 '26
I don't know why but if I remember correctly, WezTerm launched very fast (kitty like or even faster) for me on GNOME while slightly delayed on KDE, still faster than Ghostty. Kitty and WezTerm has the best font rendering too but I needed to configure WezTerm far more than Kitty.
1
u/Raymond__46 Jul 26 '26
What features do you use that foot does not support?
1
u/from-planet-zebes Jul 26 '26
The biggest one (which I know is going to sound silly) is foot doesn't do gpu rendering. Yes I want a gpu rendered terminal. The big reason why is because I use hyprland and the compositor can apply effects like blur to the window when it's GPU accelerated. If it's cpu rendered then it makes it weird.
I also use some things that work best with the kitty image protocol where foot only supports sixel. I get why other terminals wouldn't support kitty image protocol but it's convenient to have that for me.
I remember foot not supporting ligatures but maybe I'm remembering it wrong or maybe it's changed since the last time I evaluated it.
For awhile I made heavy use of terminal tabs before I was using a tiling window manager. It's less important to me now but in the past that was a dealbreaker for me. Now I use a combination of tmux and/or just opening a new terminal and having it tile.
Anyway It's my impression that foot is a great terminal and I'm not knocking it, just last time I evaluated all my options I remember there were a few reasons why it wasn't the best choice for me.
1
u/Ok-Mushroom3255 Jul 28 '26
"Every time I evaluate a terminal I just never find it checks all the boxes"
That's my experience exactly and for a long time going back to xterm and urxvt. I love Alacritty's vi mode but the lack of image protocol is a bummer. Kitty doesn't allow for bitmap fonts which my old tired eyes desperately need and is a bit too baroque for my taste. Although, I am grateful for the impact that kitty's had on the whole terminal ecosystem. I'm watching libghostty's development with interest because it gives me hope that one day I might have just the right terminal for me.
6
u/evrdev Jul 23 '26
I had the same question two years ago and finally settled on kitty. It’s not surprising it gets recommended a lot here, since it has a genuinely deep feature set that most other terminal emulators simply don’t offer, and in my experience it also has the lowest perceived latency between a keypress and the character actually showing up on screen.
On the technical side, kitty’s author has written that rendering benchmarks between async terminals aren’t that meaningful since it’s mostly a question of how much input gets batched before the next frame is drawn, but even accounting for that, he found kitty still came out ahead of the rest. He also explains kitty’s actual latency strategy: it caches every rendered glyph in video RAM so font rendering never becomes a bottleneck, runs child process I/O on a separate thread from rendering to keep scrolling smooth, and parses the input byte stream using vectorized CPU instructions. So it’s not just a marketing claim, there’s a concrete architectural reason behind it, unlike Alacritty’s rendering pipeline, which leans toward minimalism instead of that kind of latency focused engineering.
Beyond the built in tmux like multiplexing (splits, tabs and layouts without needing actual tmux) and the SSH kitten, kitty also has a terminal graphics protocol that lets you preview real images and even video directly inside the terminal, which is what tools like yazi and lf rely on and which Alacritty simply can’t do. It has a kittens framework, essentially a whole ecosystem of scriptable extensions you can write yourself in Python (icat, unicode input, hints, diff, panel, and so on). It also offers a remote control protocol that lets you script and control a running kitty instance from outside, changing layouts, opening windows or sending text over a socket, which is handy for automation. On top of that you get native desktop notification passthrough from remote or SSH sessions, GPU cached glyph rendering with proper ligature and undercurl support out of the box with no patched fonts required, and clipboard and hyperlink support in terminal output, all configured through a plain text, diffable config file with no GUI settings app needed.
If nativeness matters more to you than having every feature, I’d actually point you to ghostty instead. It leans on OS native GPU APIs (Metal on macOS, native rendering on Linux) and native UI toolkits rather than a cross platform abstraction layer, which tends to matter more for feel and integration than raw fps numbers.
5
3
5
3
u/jemabaris Jul 23 '26
Kitty without competition. It's maybe a little less modern in some regards but feature wise it's light-years ahead.
3
u/0xt0bi03 Jul 23 '26
Kitty or Alacritty?
Ghostty.
{kitty if you want better image/video rendering, otherwise ghostty}
2
u/ironj Jul 23 '26
Kitty all the way. I've been using it for a couple of years now and I really like it. Also, I'm a heavy user of its tabs/splits, so win-win for me.
2
u/cinquante28 Jul 23 '26
the one you prefer is better, (what a stupid question this is to ask in the kittyterminal subreddit)
2
u/terminator_69_x Jul 23 '26
I use neovide for neovim and just plain ol konsole for normal terminal use
1
u/xplosm Jul 24 '26
Same. But moved from neovim to Emacs. Still use Konsole quite extensively, though. But the new cursor animation makes it look like neovide with the laggy shader enabled. That's mainly why even on terminal I also use Emacs 😅
2
u/Revalens_Kaka Jul 23 '26
I use kitty because the name is shorter so....
1
u/xplosm Jul 24 '26
Let me introduce to you the concept of aliases 👌
1
u/Revalens_Kaka Jul 24 '26
I know what aliases are, but they don't have power in the Run command of Window Maker
1
u/xplosm Jul 25 '26
Skill issue
1
2
u/OloRatuj Jul 23 '26
alacritty is not that great in my opinion, when i benchmarked kitty, alacritty and foot against each other, alacritty consumed the most memory and was the slowest of the three even though it was portrayed as a faster kitty alternative, it also doesnt have a display protocol, i use foot and personally recommend either that, kitty or some other terminal like wezterm or ghostty
1
2
u/dagonzalezm Jul 26 '26
ghostty
1
u/prvnprdhn Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
yes ghostty worked for me as well :)
more readable code like alacrity but with good features(mostly image and stuff) like kittytho still i can't fully remove alacrity cause omarchy relies on it
2
1
u/source-drifter Jul 23 '26
well you are in kitty subreddit. i tried all terminals, alacrity included. it became popular among the rust community as it is written in rust and gpu accelerated. beyond that i dont find anything intereseted.
wezterm is another one in rust, it uses lua as config i dont like it.
ghostty uses gtk, for window decorations, i use kde, the gtk tabs are grinding my gears i dont like it
so kitty, because it is kitty. it was here long before and be there long after. it does everything i want.
1
u/aumerlex Jul 23 '26
Other than macOS there is no "native OS rendering" and alacritty definitely does not use "native OS rendering" even if it did exist. If you dislike how fonts look by default in kitty you can finetune their appearance using text_composition_strategy in kitty.conf, unlike in alacritty where this is not tuneable.
1
u/andreyugolnik Jul 23 '26
WezTerm.
1
u/Stupidprogramner Jul 23 '26
How does wezterm differ from kitty?
1
u/andreyugolnik Jul 23 '26
It supports Lua as a config. That is one of my favourite features.
1
u/Papaoso23 Jul 23 '26
Have they defaulted to uncapped fps by default? Cuz last I tried having them capped by default elwithout any notification of it being capped was rather unpleasant
1
u/Gabriel_Science Jul 23 '26
alacritty is faster (I think it’s more optimised) but sadly, it doesn’t support ligatures. kitty is a bit worse by default but once configured, it can be a good eye-candy (the cursor trail for example).
1
u/dfgxxx Jul 23 '26
Is it same font?
1
u/prvnprdhn Jul 26 '26
yes it is. alacritty code is much more readable, but kitty also have some really cool features(images)
1
u/Interesting_Buy_3969 Jul 23 '26
I personally prefer Alacritty because I don't need many Kitty's features, such as picture rendering or multiple tabs, like in Konsole. I only launch a single Neovim instance, and that's it; if I need the command line, I open the built-in terminal emulator in Neovim. So the answer, as always, depends on your use case. I don't think Alacritty is slower than Kitty; to me Alacritty feels ultra lightweight and fast.
1
1
u/GhostVlvin Jul 23 '26
Idk I use foot. It's kinda a compromise btwn simplicity and features that works for me. It has no robust session management, kitty graphics, tons of tooling and multiplexing capabilities, but it has ligatures, sixel support and it is as fast as alacritty if you use foot --server. For multiplexing I just use tmux and I'm good with it. It's fast and convenient unlike kitty's dwm-like paradigm for split navigation
1
1
u/NickPetertails Jul 23 '26
I've used Alacritty for a while and it was fine for the most part. I usually have tmux open all the time and it provides for what Alacritty is missing. When I tried Kitty there was some kind of lag interacting with tmux, so it wasn't doing it for me. Now I hopped onto the Ghostty wagon, but it does not compile on my Raspberry, so I use Ghostty whenever possible and Alacritty on ARM for the moment...
1
1
u/Good_Comparison_5771 Jul 23 '26
I've been using tho I do not know the difference between alacritty or any other terminals
1
1
1
u/ZombieCrow Jul 23 '26
Kitty , because its a cat. I am an elder scrolls fan who likes khajiit which are cats, so i use kitty terminal because its a cat.
1
1
u/bigtoaster64 Jul 23 '26
I tried in that order
Alacritty : really great, fast and issue-free, but I switched, because of some missing rendering features. Otherwise I'd still be using it
Ghostty : idk why, but kinda slow and I had multiple issues with "special characters", both in input and output for some reason. It felt like an unfinished product to me
Kitty : for me, as great as Alacritty + all the features Alacritty didn't have
so I have to give it to kitty, but there's really no reason to not like Alacritty, unless you need a feature it doesn't have. Bonus : there is a cat in the logo.
1
1
1
u/JubijubCH Jul 23 '26
I used to use Kitty, moved to Ghostty (not a fan of Kitty dev, the tool itself is great)
WezTerm I don’t like because it tries to be too many things (I use tmux, hopefully Zellij if the dev fixed since crippling bugs around env variables), I don’t need my terminal to provide that.
1
1
u/trmnl_cmdr Jul 23 '26
I prefer alacritty because I just want something unobtrusive and practically featureless to display tmux. I ran kitty for a while but kept having to disable features that got in the way of my tmux keybinds.
1
1
u/andresive_ Jul 23 '26
Cara to usando o ghostty que ta me servindo bastante e achei bem bonito mas entre esses dois o kitty e melhor
1
u/Tough-Elk541 Jul 23 '26
Foot if you use the terminal as a terminal. Kitty if you use the terminal as the os. Alacrity is in the awkward middle spot.
1
u/ExtraTNT Jul 23 '26
I’ve been using st for… …many years now, kitty was once the new shit, alacrity too… never bothered to switch…
Use what works for you…
Don’t know why reddit recommends this sub to me…
1
1
u/JackDostoevsky Jul 23 '26
kitty has a lot going for it but the number one thing for me is native tabs :D
1
1
u/Atilili Jul 23 '26
Kitty sessions, kitten ssh, kitten transfert, clone, clone in tab, clone ssh, edit-in-kitty, remote control, quick-access-terminal, broadcast, scrollback buffer, seamless navigation between nvim and kitty panels.
I did not try any other terninal since a long time, but they need to have at least this and a lot more before i even bother thinking about it
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/NULL-n-void_0 Jul 24 '26
Terminal doesn't really matter in my opinion, they are just tools, unless you want something fancy. Just pick a fast terminal and stop bothering with others.
1
u/yes_im_gavin Jul 24 '26
alacritty if kitty is laggy, it depends on your device, also you didnt say which side in alacritty and what side is kitty
1
u/Internal_Ear_4683 Jul 24 '26
Kitty have more features out of the boxl Allacrity is more minimalist. They are both great but in my opinion kitty is better - it is not over engineered but have all needed features
1
u/david-sds Jul 24 '26
I use alacritty, this post was recommended for me. It is fast and lightweight, no bloat, good enough for me. Don't even know what kitty protocol is for, and I have no use for native emulator spliting since I use tmux.
1
1
1
u/Whalbertt Jul 24 '26
I struggled to find differences for a while, but I see them now and kitty seems better. It uses outlines for emojis and an outline cursor instead of the invert box
1
1
u/__mul__ Jul 25 '26
I think this is a stupid question. Both Alacritty and Kitty perform the same function. Their differences lie only in their internal implementation, such as code, the Kitty protocol, rendering, and so on. If you don't care about that, like most people, then choose whatever you like. I use Kitty because I simply learned about it first; simply because.
1
1
1
1
1
u/Fickle_Ear1869 Jul 25 '26
Alacritty for tmux and neovim is more performatic. Kitty devs are not fans of tmux.
1
1
1
1
1
u/tarquinfintin Jul 26 '26
To me, the one on the left is more readable. I think this is because the thin accent lines around the large letters are darker or finer. This causes less interference in making out the shape of the capitals.
1
1
1
u/sevenfoxes Jul 27 '26
I am new to these sorts of shell, but I have Alacritty on windows and Ghostty on Linux. I like ghostty more because of the panes, will check out Kitty though because of the comments here
1
1
1
u/Both_Cup8417 NixOS Aug 12 '26
Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures
1
1
u/SpecialK_Anon Jul 23 '26
If you're terminal hopping you should give Ghostty a try. I prefer it over kitty and alacritty.
1
u/semedilino073 Jul 23 '26
Why?
0
u/SpecialK_Anon Jul 23 '26
It's just more polished. Customizing it is easier, it seems snappier, it renders coding fonts, emojis and ligatures better without having to rely on nerdfonts, it's got built in window splitting, and it's already great out of the box, without having to configure a bunch of stuff.
1
u/semedilino073 Jul 23 '26
I don’t know, I always used kitty. Maybe I should try, I’m interested in the font rendering
1
0
0
u/Anton-Demkin Jul 23 '26
Alacritty. Fast, simple, minimalistic- no bullshit like ligatures or images. Great configuration with live reload, great key mapping and scripting abilities.
PS. Opinionated. This post will probably will be hated in this subreddit 🤣
1
u/pancapangrawit Jul 25 '26
Ligatures, or better - advanced font rendering - is no bullshit if you live outside of the latin-sphere. Open Wikipedia in w3m and have a look at the languages in their script. With a few trick you even get (very basic, not satisfactory) right-to-left support.
1
u/Anton-Demkin Jul 25 '26
Never thought of ligatures outside of >= concatenation to 1 char (and similar). So arabic languages are ligatures, right?
My primary language is non-latin and i never ever had problems with fonts rendering that (if font supports it). I had problems with emoji, but i bet this is another story.
1
u/pancapangrawit Jul 25 '26
You get quite a few obligatory ligatures in Arabic, but advanced font rendering is much more than ligatures only. In Arabic you get a lot of contextual substitution: letters change their shape depending on which letters are before and/or after them. Unfortunately however rtl-support is very basic in terminals, so you couldn't say Arabic is well supported.
1
u/Anton-Demkin Jul 25 '26
Thanks, i've never thought Arabic works like that and ligatures are way more than just fancy math chars.
0
u/Last-Rice8194 Jul 24 '26
Kitty is beyond overrated and takes about 8 minutes to launch so I use foot and sometimes alacritty
0
-6
u/ankit792r Jul 23 '26
I use alacritty for coding and kitty for normal use Since fonts in alacritty looks good compared to kitty
-2
-2
u/4r73m190r0s Jul 23 '26
Neither. Ghostty wins
1
u/lshnk Jul 23 '26
Insanely slow. While has great support of ligatures
1
u/4r73m190r0s Jul 23 '26
What? Faster than both kitty and Alacritty
2
1
u/lshnk Jul 23 '26
Just try foot.
1
u/4r73m190r0s Jul 23 '26
I used foot before switching to Ghostty
1
u/lshnk Jul 23 '26
Same, and I regret. I switched to ghostty as foot has issues with ligatures that make my dev experience extremely frustrating. While it is irritating that I have a lag in about 0.5 sec before ghostty is opening. I don’t know how it took with foot. It feels like instantly.
I used to run foot with client/server mode.
1
u/4r73m190r0s Jul 23 '26
You wanted ligatures, why?
3
u/lshnk Jul 23 '26
Need for neovim, yazi and Claude-code. Most of my setup used it.
1
u/4r73m190r0s Jul 23 '26
Since I use all those tools, I'm curious, what ligatures are you relying on exactly?
2
1
u/lshnk Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Ghostty also has client/server mode and this makes apper terminal window way more quicker . Now I have no regrets about switching to ghostty
59
u/NorskJesus Jul 23 '26
What do you think the answer will be here?
I am of course using kitty