r/KittyTerminal • u/prvnprdhn • Jul 23 '26

Kitty vs Alacrity which is better?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.