this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Kitty is probably the best terminal emulator I've ever tried out... It even made me drop Tmux as multiplexer on my stupid Mac !
I only have basic use case right now, nothing complex but customization seems way above others.
The full OSC52 integration with micro for copy/past over SSH and taking up the terminal clipboard was also a game changer (nearly dropped micro because of this...)
I only scratched the surface and have only basic usage and still I can't believe one single person is behind this project (I think?).
I like it mainly because of the image protocol and supporting both x11 and wayland. I still have alacritty installed as well because i like how damn fast it is. If alacritty had proper image support i'd probably only be using alacritty, but they are both great terminal emulators.
Yeah Alacritty was my second pick, but after reading their documentation it seemed more for people accustomed to Vi and the like.
So yeah that's not something I'm willing to spare some time right now, anyway I'm mostly doing some "sys admin" stuff in my homelab, so simple text editing in a simple terminal is a better fit in my workflow/learning process !
I recently switched from alacritty to ghostty as I wanted image support as ghostty implements the kitty protocol for it. Ghostty seems as fast as alacrity to me, but with better support. It even has a tmux type replacement, although I haven't used it as I don't need it with sway doing that for me.
Images in the terminal? At that point you're just reinventing the GUI.
It's very convenient for terminal based file managers. I use it to preview my wallpapers images and then i use a keybind to set it as the wallpaper for my window manager. I also recently started using rmpc, an mpd client that can display album art.
you are aware that TUI has been a standard thing for ages, right? wanting GUI features inside a terminal isn't new and i'm not sure if you had a point with this comment other than trying to dunk on them..
As a non-user of kitty, why did it make you drop tmux? Don't they do different jobs?
Kitty has multiplexing built in so it can also replace a lot of what tmux does (unless you're using tmux over ssh)
That exception is my primary use case for tmux, so that explains it.
with kitty you can open a new terminal session that sets it's cwd to the remote directory of the server you're ssh'd into. Honestly the only thing I can think of that termux can do that kitty can't is saving sessions
Kitty can do multiplexing over ssh as well. If you have kitty installed on the remote, you can use Kitty's builtin ssh wrapper and get a lot of useful features.
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/#opt-kitten-ssh.forward_remote_control
Don't tend to have a terminal emulator of any kind installed on remote boxes. They're headless.
I generally don't either, but I do install one when using a terminal that has multiplexing. The ssh multiplexing daemon is part of the kitty binary, so it needs to be installed to work. Not really different than installing Tmux on one.
Tmux has probably some specific features Kitty won't do as good as a native multiplexer? (sorry I'm not the right person to ask this question :s) but It has the features I'm looking for without the need to install one.
It was quite cumbersome to configure a terminal + a multiplexer on MacOS to behave how I liked it. Kitty solved this issue while being fast, simple and a lot of customization in one single app.
One feature that was really important, copy/past over SSH with Micro which involved quite a hacky thing with iTerm2 + Tmux.Also being able to split my windows, create tabs...
But as I said I have only basic use cases and can't really say If Kitty's multiplexing features are on par with Tmux. However, during my web search I read about a lot of people far more knowledge than myself who actually switch to kitty from Tmux without regrets !