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Comment by 7MinOfTerror | Hacker News Reader

Kitty comes from the author whose greatest hits include refusing to acknowledge textbook errors in his use of setuid resulting in multiple privilege escalation bugs, declaring he could maintain python 2 himself, and insisting that people must configure commonly used environment variables (proxy settings) in a way that breaks every other program that uses those variables.

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This is getting ridiculous. Goyal isn't the terrible person you make him out to be, not by a long shot. Somehow recently HN commenters have had a lot of fun cherry-picking every single instance of him not communicating perfectly sharply, in his impressive multi-decade-long career as an open source maintainer and giver of free things. Stop doing this please, you're making the world just a little bit worse.

As GGP, I feel like I should clarify: I agree with this. No knock against Kitty or Kovid - I used to use Calibre extensively, and he's maintained two beloved open source projects very well. My only point is that Kitty is a very opinionated piece of software, and one should keep that in mind if they want to use it.

FWIW I think you made your point very decently.

OK so I saw this when people started jumping on bashing the Calibre author. They posted this[1] link as a reference.

Couple of things to note here:

1. I'm pretty certain that when he says he can maintain python 2 he doesn't mean python 2 but rather the python 2 version of calibre. Note that he is not a native English speaker.

2. He never actually said he wouldn't merge python 3 code. Apparently people never read past comment #2 up until comment #4:

> Kovid has stated numerous times that any patches which work towards python3 compatibility without hurting python2 functionality or performance would be happily accepted. Oddly enough, no one has ever taken him up on that, though a number of people have insisted it is very important that he himself do that work.

3. There are plenty of people in this planet that actually don't want a UI. I've been happily using rxvt-unicode for ages because of its perl scriptability. Kitty works well and has python scritability. It's way faster at rendering new windows than alacritty and has some other features that rxvt-unicode had and other terminals don't have.

There have been plenty tiling WMs spawning left and right with a pretty significant but also niche following. Not everyone wants bloated GUI's.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

> There are plenty of people in this planet that actually don't want a UI.

Yes, but there's plenty of people to do. And, in case you missed it,

> By all means, Kitty is amazing if you get into its model [...]

Actually, very few people among those that are willing to try this or that super advanced high performnace terminal care about it having or not UI...

When I come across stories of these kinds of eccentricities I always remember why my mom always said: "Some people's bad points are also their good points."

In this case the kind of stubbornness that creates an opengl terminal emulator.

There is a story like this in the Netherlands with Radio Kootwijk [0], and old, architectually stunning radio station from colonial times.

There is an intricate tilework pattern in the main hall [1] where the architect put 1 tile in wrong, on purpose. The reason was, according to him, that only god could create something perfect.

What I get out of this is that it's impossible (or rare) for someone to conceive of an architecture so grand and dearing unless you mentally consider yourself a near god.

[0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Kootwijk_(zender) [1] http://www.ronab.nl/radio-kootwijk-binnen-kijken.html

Zed Shaw? I am probably not switching from terminator but now I will keep Kitty in mind and one day give it a shot.

Wow, it's been a while since I've heard Zed's name in the wild. That aside, the author of Kitty is Kovid Goyal - you may remember him from other such impressive open source tools as Calibre.

So what are your greatest hits?

He is good in lamenting about other peoples and their free and opensource software.

It's amazing how entitled and ungrateful some people are. If you don't like it, don't use it, or fork it, or patch it, or whatever. Just don't spew vitriol at someone developing free things for the benefit of others.

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