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Comment by HIP_HOP | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, why did you move if there is also now the new Ghost TTI with 0.4? What do you benefit from this?

Not OP either but I moved back to kitty after giving ghostty a try. Kitty is pretty mature and it has tons of features. I don't use them all by any means, but enough that I missed them. It has all those features yet it feels so barebones: kitty is a delight.

What features?

I just wanna say, it's okay to prefer different terminals, like there were so many back in the day. people's dev flows become hyper specific, depending on what tools, editors, features they need... I used to use `st` back in the day, but also `urxvt` and the classic `xterm`, or `guake` for adventurous. One of my absolute favs is https://github.com/uobikiemukot/yaft which was fun to rock on classic Thinkpad T62p laptops without any X11.

It is fine, it is also fine to inquire which exact features they are looking for.

maybe compare both documentation and make urself an idea? it's all there for the taking

Also not OP but Ghostty to my knowledge doesn't support predefined layouts, so that was my reason. I tried zellij, which is awesome, but Kitty turned out to be much easier to set up and ultimately use.

Nothing against Ghostty, and in particular I really like the idea of libghostty, but a pretty significant part of its release notes is about how it's becoming more compatible with Kitty.

If you don't care about native UI widgets (I and many others only use the terminal part of the UI, so I don't) I don't really see a reason to use Ghostty over Kitty.

+1 I switched the other way because kitty gnome integration is lacking. But I like both terminals more than gnome-terminal and ptyxis.

Not OP, but I've moved back to kitty because of ghostty horrendous startup time on linux

That's a one time cost though isn't it? It's a tradeoff, but once it is booted it's blazing though.

When I use the terminal, I spawn and kill a lot of instances for quick tasks. Having a longer startup times is definitely noticeable.

My login session starts a background ghostty instance, then each new window is almost instant when I press my i3 shortcut.

This process is documented with systemd, but it's not a requirement, a plain xsessionrc could work similarly: https://ghostty.org/docs/linux/systemd

> I spawn and kill a lot of instances for quick tasks.

Why? Do you open a new browser window when you want to visit a website?

I do whenever I want two websites displayed next to each other or when I want to have them in separate workspaces, which is pretty often.

Yes actually. Ctrl+Alt+b opens a new browser window quickly and I go somewhere. I have it faster in muscle memory than switching to browser and ctrl+t and then opening whatever.

Same with terminal. My terminals (xfce4-terminal or kitty -1) both open so instantly that I can ctrl+alt+t and even while typing at high speeds, the next character is entered into the terminal.

I can type the below sequence of keys at high speed (realistic example that OCRs clipboard image):

  ctrl+alt+t vpng | ocr | ctxt alt+tab

without risking the startup time swallowing my `vp` keys

And yes, I disable animations for any kind of window switching mechanism including alt-tab/worksapce switch

At any rate, I believe ghostty has the same single instance mode equivalent.

In case you're not aware, there exists:

    ghostty +new-window

tmux?

I figured that was an issue with the appimage for me. Did you install it a different way that you ran into that issue?

also slow startup times, archlinux, official repo package

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.

edit:typo

I’m probably going to move away from Ghostty because it crashes too much on Linux

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