Kitty Terminal 0.40.0 introduces the Text Sizing Protocol: "multiple font sizes ... in a backwards compatible, opt-in way"
Kitty Terminal 0.40.0 introduces the Text Sizing Protocol: "multiple font sizes ... in a backwards compatible, opt-in way"
Classically, because the terminal is a grid of equally sized characters, only a single text size was supported in terminals, with one minor exception, some characters were allowed to be rendered in...
Glad to hear about the "opt in".
Partially blind guy here who struggles to use computers these days because EVERYTHING IS FREAKING TEENY TINY TEXT YOU CAN'T CHANGE ESPECIALLY MOBILE AAAAAH IT HURTS.
Ahem.
Yes I'm a bit bitter :)
I'm waiting for the day when these enhanced terminals go full GUI and mouse driven.
Wait, are we moving on from vim vs emacs?
ok, that's it, I'm donating monthly
Goyal goated as always
Kovid GOATal
Kitty is probably the best terminal emulator I've ever tried out... It even made me drop Tmux as multiplexer on my stupid Mac !
I only have basic use case right now, nothing complex but customization seems way above others.
The full OSC52 integration with micro for copy/past over SSH and taking up the terminal clipboard was also a game changer (nearly dropped micro because of this...)
I only scratched the surface and have only basic usage and still I can't believe one single person is behind this project (I think?).
As a non-user of kitty, why did it make you drop tmux? Don't they do different jobs?
Tmux has probably some specific features Kitty won't do as good as a native multiplexer? (sorry I'm not the right person to ask this question :s) but It has the features I'm looking for without the need to install one.
It was quite cumbersome to configure a terminal + a multiplexer on MacOS to behave how I liked it. Kitty solved this issue while being fast, simple and a lot of customization in one single app.
One feature that was really important, copy/past over SSH with Micro which involved quite a hacky thing with iTerm2 + Tmux.Also being able to split my windows, create tabs...
But as I said I have only basic use cases and can't really say If Kitty's multiplexing features are on par with Tmux. However, during my web search I read about a lot of people far more knowledge than myself who actually switch to kitty from Tmux without regrets !
I like it mainly because of the image protocol and supporting both x11 and wayland. I still have alacritty installed as well because i like how damn fast it is. If alacritty had proper image support i'd probably only be using alacritty, but they are both great terminal emulators.
I recently switched from alacritty to ghostty as I wanted image support as ghostty implements the kitty protocol for it. Ghostty seems as fast as alacrity to me, but with better support. It even has a tmux type replacement, although I haven't used it as I don't need it with sway doing that for me.
Yeah Alacritty was my second pick, but after reading their documentation it seemed more for people accustomed to Vi and the like.
So yeah that's not something I'm willing to spare some time right now, anyway I'm mostly doing some "sys admin" stuff in my homelab, so simple text editing in a simple terminal is a better fit in my workflow/learning process !
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/8226 shows an example of rendered text.
Interesting, that's the guy that develops calibre as well
This is cool! I'm almost more interested in the underline gaps for descenders that got snuck in as a "oh yeah I did this too" feature. That makes underlined text so much easier to read, IMO.
I always wondered if something like this could be possible in the future of terminals. glad to see kitty pushing the envelope! Looking forward to see this used for stuff like markdown rendering. Hoping this gets picked up by other terminals and neovim like the undercurl did.