This week in the Console newsletter we interviewed Kovid, the creator of Kitty! Kitty is a cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal. We talked about why a GPU is useful for terminals. I thought /r/linux might be interested in reading the interview! :)

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/linux

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  • kitty

    Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

  • I'm surprised to see so much praise for kitty in this thread, considering Kovid's past controversies. His attitude towards criticism in the past has not been the best (examples here and here), and he seems to rule over his projects with a complete iron fist. Just taking a look at kitty's issue tracker, barring low-effort or bad issue reports, he often seems to respond with a non-fix and then immediately closes the issue. I guess I respect how active he is in maintaining his projects (seems like he interacts with almost every new issue), but he seems quite arrogant in defending his designs/taste. For my money, I prefer alacritty, which is even a smidge faster on my machine.

  • notcurses

    blingful character graphics/TUI library. definitely not curses.

  • Not to say he isn't controversial (there's plenty of other examples of his abrasive personality) but the technical excellence of kitty is hard to ignore. You even get projects like NotCurses recommending that other terminals take note of kitty's enhancements (keyboard protocol and graphics). Even looking at the linked issue they made for an enhancement to the kitty graphics protocol, it definitely feeds the narrative that Kovid is plenty happy to take suggestions for clear technical improvements, but is just very opinionated. I don't use kitty but I hope that other terminals can take his ideas and improve them even more.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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