opentype-shaping-documents VS kitty

> The tangent in (1) on how they contradict unicode could have been skipped as well

Not only because confusables already exist, but also (as I already said[1] the previous time this was posted) covering all ligatures used in all typographical styles is very much a non-goal of Unicode. The official position is that the font shaping layer[2] sits atop Unicode’s semantic representation and is free to ligate, spindle, or mutilate it for display however it prefers (at least for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic it’s a preference; other scripts can’t be rendered at all without doing it, such as Arabic—barring the legacy presentational forms—or Burmese[3]).

The only reason Unicode even has those ligatures is that some IBM encodings (which were more presentational in nature) encoded them, and IBM employees wrote a large part of the early standard (based on the decades of i18n experience they had at that point) and wanted roundtripping.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639966

[2] https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents

[3] https://r12a.github.io/scripts/mymr/my.html#combiningV

Initially, I used the Mac's built-in Terminal, but encountered issues with font loading. This led me to explore alternative terminal options. I initially chose Kitty, but after the official release of Ghostty, I made the switch. It has been running flawlessly for me.

kitty

I quite liked Kitty, and wanted to keep using it. But the slow startup was a deal breaker for me. Even with `--single-instance` it was at least 5x that of st for me, which is noticeable for an app I use very frequently. Besides, I'm not a fan of running a single instance of any app, since if (when) it crashes, all my work is gone.

Then I had a look around their issue tracker, and noticed others complained about this too[1]. And the dismissive and defensive response from the author just rubbed me the wrong way.

[1]: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/330

kitty is very close, which is impressive when you remember that the vast majority of the work is done by one guy (Kovid Goyal).

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues — 0.239% vs 0.137%

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues — 0.729% vs 0.317%

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/graphs/contributors

In recent years, new terminal emulators have appeared. I tried using them mainly for testing macmon. A couple of years ago, I tried switching to kitty, which was faster due to GPU acceleration. However, it required too much customization and still looked very non-native for macOS. GPU acceleration was added to iTerm as well, so I stayed with it.

No it's not. The author smuggles opt-out telemetry and is suspiciously abrasive towards users pointing this out.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544

It's not just Kitty graphics, the Kitty Keyboard Protocol is a DOS waiting to happen, and Goyal with his customary charm is very hostile to the idea of correcting his mistake: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/7749

This isn't the only problem with KKB, it must be deprecated and replaced.