this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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TIL Kitty terminal can show a dock panel on Linux desktops! (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/panel/

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

On one hand, kitty is doing a very aggressive job of advancing the terminal world.

  • Providing protocol extensions to permit terminal software to use more modifier keys than were available in the past, which is something that I really wanted to see.

  • Providing a newer graphics protocol than the ancient Sixel

which kitty also supports. Terminal software can render images

mpv can even (slowly) play movies in-terminal using said protocol.

  • It can leverage the GPU for acceleration.

On the other hand, it's got some things that I don't like:

  • By default, it phones home. I really do not like software doing this.

  • It keeps attracting new functionality at a very rapid rate, much of which is on by default, and many of which I don't know if I want. There are a bunch of modules ("kittens"), and a lot of functionality (including aiming to be tmux-like) that I don't know if I want in a virtual terminal program. This increases the attack surface, which is something I'm kind of sensitive about for a program that's intended to sandbox content from remote systems. xterm has a lot of cruft related to older protocols and features too, but at least that's pretty mature code...and it still has had a bit of a security history.

  • The startup time isn't great. urxvt can run a daemon, urxvtd. foot just starts up quickly on its own. Kitty can do kitty -1, which makes subsequent windows open quickly, but close all open terminal windows, and you're back to the window taking a noticeable amount of time to come up.

  • I'm not sure about the merits of another extension, its ability to render differently-sized fonts in-terminal. That seems like it might fragment terminal software into being able to run on a grid-based set of characters and not.

I spent a while using it and then went back to foot. There's just very little that I actually want to do and would take advantage of that foot can't do (though to be fair, I might make more use of the graphics protocol if tmux supported it

the closest one can get graphics-wise there is a non-mainline tmux fork with experimental Sixel support).

If tmux supported the kitty graphics protocol and then some emacs packages also added support

a lot of those have the ability to use graphics, but will only do so in a non-terminal environment

that could take me back to kitty, though.

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Have you tried Alacritty? And if you have, what are your opinions of it compared to Kitty?

[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I have

at one point or another, I'm pretty sure that I've tried every Linux virtual terminal program out there that's been packaged for major distros in the past twenty years

but it was some time back, and I don't remember specifics. For me, time to start and text throughput was a pretty dominant factor, and urxvt (for X11) or foot (for Wayland) ranked highly there.

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Good to know, thanks. As a noob any information is useful to me.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Don't take this as zinging alacrity as unusual or whatever. I mean, I don't care about tabs, for example, because I do "tabs" inside the terminal, using tmux, so I'm fine using something like urxvt, foot, or alacrity, but many people don't, and care a bunch about having multiple tabs in a virtual terminal program. Time to open terminals, which I care about, may not matter much if you launch them with the mouse instead of whacking a key combination -- by the time your fingers get back to the keyboard, the terminal is probably up.

Most virtual terminal programs work more-or-less the same way, outside something exotic like cool-retro-term, and you'll be fine with choosing any of them.

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah I didn't read it as a negative at all, but thanks for explaining anyway. Never got to the point of seriously trying tmux yet, but I will eventually. I understand it does more than just "tabs in your terminal".