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points by flohofwoe 4 days ago | 0 comments

Very similar, about the only difference from user perspective is that Kitty has a slight content 'wobble' on macOS when resizing the window (this typically happens when the content is rendered via an MTKView or CAMetalLayer and its parent view's 'layerContentsPlacement' isn't anchored to one side during window resizing). That would be trivial to fix though.

PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).

TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.

Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

[–] paaloeye 4 days ago

Proper Windows support is not easy to archive. Plus with Windows Terminal being good enough and open-source, there isn't much incentive to support it.

[–] flohofwoe 4 days ago

Windows Terminal doesn't support Kitty Graphics Protocol (yet?: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389).

That's the one thing I always check first in a terminal because I have this pet project to run emulators in a terminal ;)

https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty

(works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)

[–] paaloeye 4 days ago

Honestly, as fun as it is using KGP, I don't consider it critical for any real use cases.

If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.

[–] louis_ 3 days ago

I'm thinking of TUI-based messaging applications, where you would rather see the actual image than a placeholder like "[Image #1]". Well I admit I'm a TUI person, too lazy to grab my mouse.

[–] msephton 3 days ago

Same caveats apply to Kitty author’s other app Calibre (ebook manager)

[–] darkwater 4 days ago

> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).

This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".

[–] flohofwoe 4 days ago

Maybe, but it reminds me of the bad old days when Microsoft called their applications 'cross-platform', and then they just meant different flavours of Windows ;)

[–] darkwater 4 days ago

I mean, I share the sentiment, and IMO they should support at least the BSDs (there are official FreeBSD ports for both Kitty and Ghostty but no mentions of them in both websites)

[–] devsda 4 days ago

> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows

Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D

[–] jodrellblank 3 days ago

And yet Windows Terminal is hardware accelerated and is two years older than GhosTTY (2019 vs 2021)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/

[–] flohofwoe 2 days ago

Tbf, 'hardware accelerated' doesn't mean much when your text renderer is slow (which apparently seems to have been fixed after the 'Muratori drama': https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...)