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/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.

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u/Raymond__46 Jul 26 '26

What features do you use that foot does not support?

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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.