terminator VS kitty

Until recently, my answer would have been Terminator. Recently, however, the lack of support for OSC52 and the fact that the workarounds don't always work reliably has been bothering me more and more. Based on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495, it is quite unlikely that VTE (and therefore Terminator) will ever support OSC52.

For terminal software, I really enjoy using Terminator, because it allows me to spawn several tiled terminals in a single window, with a custom arrangement that can expand and shrink easily.

I use Terminator as terminal emulator and ZSH as shell.

Using a Terminal Emulator with native support for split panes (Examples: Terminator)

I use the ZSH as a shell with its own configuration. As terminal emulator I use Terminator. From my personal point of view I don't need anything more modern.

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.

For those that have to bounce between Mac and Linux for work/personal reasons, I cannot recommend Kitty terminal enough.

The main thing that's a big of a pain is you'll probably want to set up a scrollback pager (I use neovim as mine but vim works too) so you easily search the terminal output and copy/paste from it.

I use

# https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/719#issuecomment-...

scrollback_pager nvim -u ~/.config/kitty/kitty-scrollback-pager.vimrc -c "silent write! /tmp/kitty_scrollback_buffer | te cat /tmp/kitty_scrollback_buffer -"

and the scrollback pager vimrc:

```