What does that even mean. It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained. He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
Outsider design? It means it’s designed by someone self-taught or not classically trained in the subject. It’s neither insult nor praise, it’s a classification, though often used as a way to express something as being unconventional and interesting.
> It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
No, because it refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”. It’s two words but a single term.
> He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained.
Your parent comment didn’t claim they were making art. But they are designing the app are are clearly untrained in design. Again, that’s not an insult. How many of us here are self-taught programmers?
> He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. If that were the case there would be no designers, everyone would just do their thing. The point of learning design is to understand what works and why and how to apply it. It is perfectly valid for you to have a vision of what you want the thing to do but to need help in presenting it more effectively.
When I first used Calibre I thought it was a disorganised mess trying to cram too many features in one app.
Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.
I don't see why people are complaining about the UI. The calibre codebase is just Python and you can vibe code/customize a nicer UI for it in minutes. It's not like the core changes much. Their metadata resolution and Epub handling and (formerly DRM cracking) are best in class.
Vibe-coded or not, I prefer staying close to upstream unless I have very good reasons not to, and I would not want to have to half-heartedly maintain a UI fork of this. I would still be quite excited about an official visual overhaul, though
Can we please stop with the suggesting vibe coding for everything? That’s not an interesting response, it doesn’t advance the discussion and no one learns anything. The goal of this website is (ostensibly) intellectual curiosity, and suggesting AI as a solution to every problem is basically a thought-terminating cliché.
I really love Kitty, it took me only about 5 minutes to migrate from Ghostty.
just wish the used this icon as default: https://github.com/DinkDonk/kitty-icon
I'd say 100-200 ms is not horrendous but it can be much better without giving up on libghostty-vt :) check out Monstar.
Now, Monstar has a bizarre issue (at least in my setup) where it displays blank instead of capital A when used with Fixedsys Excelsior, for some reason. But hey it starts in under 10ms.
I love Kitty. I've used it since discovering it in about 2019 and it strikes the right balance of things.
It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.
I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.
When I used Kitty, I hacked in a shader that'd render a crude glow around the letters so that I could use more translucent backgrounds and still have readable text. I have no idea where that code is - I haven't used Kitty for years. But that's the kind of thing that'd be great to do with the shader support.
I use multiple terminals. I like Ghostty and Kitty. I the past I tried multiple others like Guake, Allacritty, xterm, Gnome Terminal, ITerm (when I was forced to use a Mac), Windows Terminal (I am now forced to work on Windows).
And of all terminals I still prefer Kitty. There is one feature Kitty has that no other has (or not yet) and that is the 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.
> 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.
When do you use this? (guessing, when you run something that crashes the terminal?)
Possibly related: I use ctrl+shift+h (and somehow configured it to use neovim), which is a nice way to navigate the terminal history - useful when pilfering through thousands of lines of local server logs
I believe I got rid of most of the issues with some .ssh setting which simply uses the normal xterm I believe. I can't check right at this moment, but apparently, simply using xterm and not the xterm-xkitty or what it's called does not actually make much problems when ssh-ing into a machine - not in my case at least.
It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.
I am using kitty to run Claude TUI and Gnome Terminal for everything else. The reason is that kitty has basically no chrome around the terminal so there is more space for Claude to write its stuff. Furthermore it's got a different icon so I can pick it more easily from the task bar or with Alt-Tab. However it's got no menus and it takes a "man kitty" to learn how to use it (a /s to myself, I used to read the man pages of everything.) Gnome Terminal has menus and dialogs and that makes it more discoverable and easier to configure. I am using it for bash.
Can someone give me a use case of where terminal shaders are providing functionality, rather than eye candy? I mean I love my retro crt look, but there has to be a better reason to have shaders on a term
I use a cursor following shader. It is subtle, but i feel like it draws your eye to where ever the input cursor lands. I train users on a tui application, and it seems to help them as well.
A significant differenciator is the dev/maintainer I'd say. No, really, hear me out :) I'd start with: this goes for almost any FOSS tool, not just this. Not saying one is good, one is not – but user choices, user feedback, interactions, deisgn goals/choices get affected (and sometimes influence) a lot based on how a dev/maintainer looks at their product and humans who use, or would use, their product – or contribute for that matter.
To the point that Ghosty and all other new terms are just catching up with kitty. Ghosty is celebware and will likely die away once the author loses interest, despite the flame.
I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as Kitty "taking rendering shortcuts." Is this what you're referring to?
> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.
UI-wise, I kinda like Ghostty more. It feels slightly more polished. However, I've moved to Kitty mainly because of its native session support. The only way to have sessions in Ghostty is through a multiplexer, which I'm not a fan of anymore.
I haven't try Ghostty, but what I like about kitty is that it's performant, easy to customize (often it's just one line to add and you get that new feature you want), I like their defaults for tabs, layouts. It's not overwhelming but not too minimal either. I just find it's a sweet spot. I also somehow like the personality of the maintainer which seem to have a nice vision for the project. My major gripe is that it's not available on windows, but anyways I rarely use microslop products nowadays.
AFAIK, Ghostty is as performant. At least, on macOS. I used both and didn't see much difference. Decided to go with Ghostty as it feels more native than Kitty.
Print a massive log file in kitty/ghostty, and another one with you default terminal, and you'll see a massive difference in how fast the log is printed out. Well to be honest it's just comfort, I can't claim it makes a difference in actual productivity, for me the real benefits of kitty are just the terminal multiplexer-ish capabilities (panes, sessions), other rendering niceties like adjusting the font, or having smooth scroll, sensible default shortcuts. But the actual "performance" e.g. input lag or rendering lag, I don't think it's that important.
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).
> 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".
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 ;)
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)
> 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
For some strange reason I kind of settled on tabby. Also
as an alternative on Linux (though I tend to use KDE konsole
more there).
Kitty has some nice ideas, but I don't know ... I am getting
lazy, so tabby works for my use cases on Windows (mostly just
a fancypants wrapper over cmd.exe really; I don't even use
powershell anymore, ruby or crystal cover all my scripting
needs, including the assumption of OOP in shells).
Kitty is my go-to for the Linux desktop. I discovered it in an early stage and really liked it from the beginning. It’s great to see that the project continues to be developed so vigorously.
Nice. I love kitty. But somehow I just realized I'm stuck in 0.47 even though I'm on Fedora, it's like 6 months old. Excited to try the automated session restore.
It's nowhere as featureful as kitty, but i've been using cmder and it's good enough a replacement for the default windows terminal for daily use. But if you use powershell, i m not sure what a good replacement is (but it does work in cmder iirc).
https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.
Not yet, but there are several projects that exist to build it for Windows: https://wintty.io/ describes itself as "A native Windows terminal built on the Ghostty core" (i.e., wrapping libghostty in a Windows application), and is probably the one I'd start with. There's also https://noctty.com/ which has taken a similar approach.
Both are clearly LLM-assisted projects, but https://noctty.com/ has a very Claude-esque front page whereas https://wintty.io/ doesn't set off my LLM detectors nearly as badly. However, Wintty's download page says "Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself" so if you decide you don't like that business model then you may wish to try Noctty, which does have prebuilt binaries.
NOTE: I have not spent any amount of time with either of those, so I can't give personal recommendations either for or against either.
What a legend.
Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.
Works amazingly well.
Looks amazingly bad.
He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained. He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
Outsider design? It means it’s designed by someone self-taught or not classically trained in the subject. It’s neither insult nor praise, it’s a classification, though often used as a way to express something as being unconventional and interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_music
> It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
No, because it refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”. It’s two words but a single term.
> He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained.
Your parent comment didn’t claim they were making art. But they are designing the app are are clearly untrained in design. Again, that’s not an insult. How many of us here are self-taught programmers?
> He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. If that were the case there would be no designers, everyone would just do their thing. The point of learning design is to understand what works and why and how to apply it. It is perfectly valid for you to have a vision of what you want the thing to do but to need help in presenting it more effectively.
Like calibre, I guess :)
Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs
Presenting... MultiPSK!
https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MPSK-Fig1...
https://arngren.net/
Put forward your vision
Now, Monstar has a bizarre issue (at least in my setup) where it displays blank instead of capital A when used with Fixedsys Excelsior, for some reason. But hey it starts in under 10ms.
edit:typo
It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.
I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.
When do you use this? (guessing, when you run something that crashes the terminal?)
Possibly related: I use ctrl+shift+h (and somehow configured it to use neovim), which is a nice way to navigate the terminal history - useful when pilfering through thousands of lines of local server logs
I love kitty, have used it for a long while now and pretty happy, except for that one thing about ssh xterm - but even that is mostly minor.
Really cool to see such active development of an already perfectly capable and working software.
It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.
A scan of this list doesn't indicate any breaking changes: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#id1
Okay, that's pretty cool. How does it handle spacing though? Do the columns in ls/top/etc still line up?
enabled_layouts fat
map kitty_mod+l no_op
map kitty_mod+enter no_op
# disable open/close
map kitty_mod+n no_op
map kitty_mod+w no_op
I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/docs/faq.rst...
People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.
> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.
Serious question.
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).
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".
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
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)
If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.
Kitty has some nice ideas, but I don't know ... I am getting lazy, so tabby works for my use cases on Windows (mostly just a fancypants wrapper over cmd.exe really; I don't even use powershell anymore, ruby or crystal cover all my scripting needs, including the assumption of OOP in shells).
gz on the release
Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.
https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.
Both are clearly LLM-assisted projects, but https://noctty.com/ has a very Claude-esque front page whereas https://wintty.io/ doesn't set off my LLM detectors nearly as badly. However, Wintty's download page says "Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself" so if you decide you don't like that business model then you may wish to try Noctty, which does have prebuilt binaries.
NOTE: I have not spent any amount of time with either of those, so I can't give personal recommendations either for or against either.