Having used it for three weeks before coming back to Kitty, my conclusions were that it’s a better terminal for people who need a terminal but don’t ‘live in’ their terminal. Ghostty just feels really polished and ‘native’ and it’s obviously faster than, say, iterm or the stock term on macOS. So Ghostty is what I would now recommend to anyone who just wants a nice terminal without the goal of turning it into a highly personalized IDE, like Kitty allows you to do.
The only feature of Ghostty that I now miss in Kitty: setting the text size of each window pane independently. Oh and the slightly smoother quake terminal, even though I don’t use that much.
Ghostty makes some choices that I personally find bizarre. For one, on macOS, cmd+, opens config in textedit instead of in $EDITOR. Another is there isn’t a key action for moving panes; you need to use the mouse. At least half of the config options are platform-specific. And weirdest of all scripting is limited and can only really be done with (get this) AppleScript.
So, like I surmised (and I could be wrong, of course), Ghostty is just a nice terminal that lives alongside your other apps; Kitty is powerful enough to practically act like a second desktop environment (that is also cross-platform).
Of course, this post is about libghostty, the underlying term emulator library. And that is an amazing contribution to the ecosystem! Zmx, herdr, soon neovim, now emacs, hopefully someday Zed – so many things can now embed an amazingly performant terminal
I can only speak for western Europe. New-builds prioritize energy efficiency, because energy is expensive and, depending on the region, involves burning fossil fuels. There also tax incentives. The lucky new builds have reversible floor heating attached to a heat pump. That can keep the temperature around 26 celsius. Still on the warmer side but not unbearable. Anyway, AC is (or at least was) seen as a last resort, hardly worth it for the ten or so actually hot days we get a year. Obviously, that counter has been steadily going up, so the mindset is changing.
If you do most of your work on a central server and treat your other devices as thin clients, then (afaik) Tmux/Zellij are the way to go – not to mention if you want to multiplayer with colleagues.
(I know Wezterm has remote session multiplexing in beta, but I’d be surprised if you can re-attach from a different machine.)
Lately I’ve been experimenting with embracing the total scriptability of my favorite terminal, Kitty. Its creator is famously outspoken about non-native multiplexers, precisely because of the pitfalls you mentioned and because they hold back the terminal ecosystem.
Couple of recent issues I’ve had: washed-out colors in Claude Code, desktop notifications not passing through, scrollback weirdness, and image protocol mismatches.
I used to treat Zellij as an OS to build my own IDE in. Now it’s Kitty.
I save layouts as a Kitty session. Important limitation: this doesn’t persist running processes. And so enter zmx. Whenever I need a process I can reattach to I wrap it in zmx.
A terminal agent can interact with the kitty cli to create splits and such. I’m still on the fence as to whether that’s safe. Probably not. Also, tmux is likely better represented in the training data. Currently experimenting with running claude inside tmux (multiplexing) inside nono (sandbox).
According to my Volvo EX30 I’m always tired. It feels like they’ve dialed down the sensitivity in recent updates, but for the first year it was beeping at me five minutes into every drive. Really easy to trigger the alert by fake yawning. I turned it into a little game. Oh, and I can’t look over my shoulder to check my blindspot. Nope: driver distracted.
My steering wheel has one macro button, which I can bind to EITHER disabling speed alerts or driver monitoring alerts but, very unfortunately, not both. So guess who’s sometimes poking at their touchscreen while they should be focusing on the road?
Not against alerts in principle but it should be a less is more kind of thing
Not just the GBA, apparently! 3rd party handhelds like the Pocket and emulators are supported too.
From the website to the software, this looks stunning.
Tried chip music with nanoloop several years ago. Wasn't 100% for me: 1) pure chip music is too jarring for my ears; 2) it's in the name ('nanoloop'), but it pushes you toward short repeating loops. Once you've heard the same 4-bar loop a couple of hundred times, it's hard to imagine the next phrase. Feels like getting stuck. This has a 128 pattern * 16-step sequencer. If those patterns are easy to chain, then this could be really nice for longer phrases.
Can anyone comment on how much effort goes into flashing a cartridge? I've never done it. Back in the day, I just ordered nanoloop straight from the website.
I'd feel bad calling it 'half-baked' though, seeing as they've published some incredibly in-depth posts about how they develop and test the vim mode. (At the time of writing at least, they had a Neovim core contributor on the team.)
So it does surprise me they haven't made switching between panels more seamless. I've had to add a bunch of extra custom keybinds, and tbh I'm still getting tripped up. Feels like I'm constantly reminding myself to switch between different sets of muscle memory.
Imagine having access to information about thousands of years of human history, with all its big migrations, the ebbs and flows of civilizations, religions and empires, and still actually thinking one people in particular have some natural claim to a stretch of land.
What if instead we respected state sovereignty and international law for the betterment of all instead of continually stirring up shit to benefit of a few powerful figures?
Just curious – what privileges do you feel you've had to give up on the path to a slightly more equitable society?
Because as a man myself I honestly wouldn't be able to say which privileges I've lost that my forefathers enjoyed, besides sexism with impunity. In fact, I have it easier, for the time being at least. No military conscription for one. And with the recognition that the patriarchy hurts all I've been able to actualize myself in a way that is more authentic to myself than the constraints of past generations would have allowed.
Good. They’re fuel-inefficient, low visibility murder machines that do not belong in Europe, where city roads and parking spaces tend to be narrower. Not once in the last few years have I seen a pickup truck bed in use. Average number of occupants: one, male. And it’s always the same kind of person. Like with cybertruck owners, there’s an air of overcompensation. Where they’re not compensating, unfortunately: road taxes, where they’re taxed as a non-commercial vehicle, despite polluting and weighing as much as a small van, while being driven by some of the least road safety conscious, tailgating assholes I’ve encountered.
(/rant. Pickup trucks have a purpose, such as in low density rural areas. That’s not the case in Belgium, for instance. Either you need a van because it’s for work, or you rent a lightweight van on the few occasions you actually need to transport a lot of stuff.)
Haha true. I’d considered that. But then, so is any code the agent writes, which will ultimately run outside the sandbox.
So it’s certainly not perfect. An isolated VM or a VPS provides the best guarantees. For me though it’s good enough. I’ve put my risk profile at: ‘don’t fuck up my system directly and don’t exfiltrate secrets directly’
Lately I've taken to Iosevka, the 'curly' variant to be precise. Even though I hated it when I first tried it, I revisited it because I was noticing that, with coding agents running in the same window, I wanted to be able to see more at a glance. With Iosevka's semi-width glyphs you can just fit a lot more in the same space. Took a day or two to get used to its slender appearance. Now every other font feels unnecessarily w i d e
I really like lima too. It's my go-to recommendation for light VMs. But I do consider it slightly less convenient.
A good example of why is project-local .venv/ directories, which are the default with uv. With Lima, what happens is that macOS package builds get mounted into a Linux system, with potential incompatibility issues. Run uv sync inside the VM and now things are invalid on the macOS side. I wasn't able to find a way to mount the CWD except for certain subdirectories.
Another example is network filtering. Lima (understandably) doesn't offer anything here. You can set up a firewall inside the VM, but there's no guarantee your agent won't find a way to touch those rules. You can set it up outside the VM, but then you're also proxying through a MITM.
So, for the use case of running Claude Code in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode, Lima is more hassle than Nono
Might be something specific to my and my colleagues' systems, but it breaks the TUI. It needs git authentication, which fails, and the TUI stops accepting input reliably
And for the macos users, I can’t recommend nono enough. (Paying it forward, since it was here on HN that I learned about it.)
Good DX, straightforward permissions system, starts up instantly. Just remember to disable CC’s auto-updater if that’s what you’re using. My sandbox ranking: nono > lima > containers.
The only feature of Ghostty that I now miss in Kitty: setting the text size of each window pane independently. Oh and the slightly smoother quake terminal, even though I don’t use that much.
Ghostty makes some choices that I personally find bizarre. For one, on macOS, cmd+, opens config in textedit instead of in $EDITOR. Another is there isn’t a key action for moving panes; you need to use the mouse. At least half of the config options are platform-specific. And weirdest of all scripting is limited and can only really be done with (get this) AppleScript.
So, like I surmised (and I could be wrong, of course), Ghostty is just a nice terminal that lives alongside your other apps; Kitty is powerful enough to practically act like a second desktop environment (that is also cross-platform).
Of course, this post is about libghostty, the underlying term emulator library. And that is an amazing contribution to the ecosystem! Zmx, herdr, soon neovim, now emacs, hopefully someday Zed – so many things can now embed an amazingly performant terminal