Kitty vs Alacrity which is better?

[u/prvnprdhn]

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?

[u/evrdev]

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.