wezterm VS kitty

Compare wezterm vs kitty and see what are their differences.

wezterm

A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust (by wezterm)
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wezterm kitty
156 316
20,674 27,717
3.1% 1.7%
9.7 9.9
11 days ago 3 days ago
Rust Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

wezterm

Posts with mentions or reviews of wezterm. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-06.

kitty

Posts with mentions or reviews of kitty. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-20.
  • Why your terminal is boring and what to use instead
    7 projects | dev.to | 20 May 2025
    Kitty: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty
  • Optimizing My Dev Workflow in 2025
    7 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2025
    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.
  • [RFC] Allow terminal programs to display text in different sizes
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2025
  • An Actually Productive Arch Linux Setup
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2025
    kitty
  • Suckless.org: software that sucks less
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2025
    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

  • Analyzing the codebase of Caffeine: a high performance caching library
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2025
    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

  • From iTerm To WezTerm
    9 projects | dev.to | 9 Jan 2025
    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.
  • iTerm2 Critical Security Fix
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2025
    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

  • Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2025
    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.

  • Ghostty 1.0
    36 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2024

What are some alternatives?

When comparing wezterm and kitty you can also consider the following projects:

Warp - Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

zsh-autocomplete - 🤖 Real-time type-ahead completion for Zsh. Asynchronous find-as-you-type autocompletion.

alacritty - A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

iTerm2-Color-Schemes - Over 400 terminal color schemes/themes for iTerm/iTerm2. Includes ports to Terminal, Konsole, PuTTY, Xresources, XRDB, Remmina, Termite, XFCE, Tilda, FreeBSD VT, Terminator, Kitty, MobaXterm, LXTerminal, Microsoft's Windows Terminal, Visual Studio, Alacritty, Ghostty, and many more

nerd-fonts - Iconic font aggregator, collection, & patcher. 3,600+ icons, 50+ patched fonts: Hack, Source Code Pro, more. Glyph collections: Font Awesome, Material Design Icons, Octicons, & more

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InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
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Did you know that Rust is
the 5th most popular programming language
based on number of references?