The community overwhelmingly praises libghostty 1.0 for providing a stable, high-performance C library that simplifies embedding terminal emulation in diverse applications like IDEs and custom TUIs. Users highlight the project's rigorous ABI design and rapid ecosystem growth as key benefits, although some note that specific features like Windows support or advanced configuration UIs remain limited compared to established terminals.
210 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4kovidgoyal
kitty
Python2017–2026
kovidgoyal / kitty
kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
87Distinct people
113Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
35.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
GitHub
Where it is used
- Graphviz — Graphviz adds a -Tkitty output to display inline graphics using the kitty Terminal graphics protocol. This implements inline graphics in terminals that support that protocol, including kitty. Source
- mpv (media player) — mpv is documented on kitty's integrations page as using kitty's graphics/video output (vo=kitty) to play videos in the terminal. Source
What people are saying
I mostly switched to librem 14, arch linux (i3wm, gnome from time to time), still using a mac for work (mostly presentations, video conferencing). Development tends to get more…
kgarten used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- alacritty/alacritty · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- gnachman/iterm2 · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- tmux/tmux · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year113 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-01-07 04:17:33 UTC to 2026-10-07 18:29:01 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 3 | 10 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 2 | 12 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 19 | 1 | 18 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 1 | 10 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
What Hacker News says
113 sourcesSLslowin·Oct 7, 2026
I've moved back to Kitty and now I wonder why I ever left! Kovid not only consistently innovates in the terminal space, he also helps set standards. It really is a great, non-commercial project that I think everyone should support. I'd love if they a better icon on Mac OS though.
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
In No new Ghostty updates since MarchGood questions.
> why did it write so much to begin with?
It's an incremental project covering a complex domain. At any time, the code has to stay balanced in a spot that addresses correctness and performance across things like pty parsing, a terminal grid, stateful pty behavior, rendering, scrollback history, font glyphs, and like all software there is a fractal of idiosyncrasies that sprout up. And that's just the terminal side.
Unless you can see the future, like most software, so much of the project is trying things and seeing what happens at the periphery, like how to represent "row damage" and apply it in a way that works with macOS Core Graphics and 1000 other things.
e.g. Can you tell me off the top of your head what the trade-offs are of representing the terminal contents/scrollback as a pre-wrapped grid vs. a list of logical lin
Read the rest
es that are soft-wrapped on the fly? Did you enumerate them all and correctly weigh them such that you can pick the ideal solution ahead of time? No. You just kinda make educated decisions and find out in practice what the exact weight of the trade-offs are.
You should see the amount of iterations a human needs on these kinds of projects. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty has almost 18,000 commits. So does https://github.com/gnachman/iterm2. So does https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty.
> why do you assume that now there's no more debt?
I don't. Like all software, you try to ratchet into better and better positions, and you try to come up with metrics that can tell you "You are here" with regard to rather fuzzy goals like "it should be correct and performant and nice to use".
But I can look at individual findings and their solution to go "yes, this improves the code." And on principle I think that, e.g. correct/DRY/simple by-construction is superior to by-convention, and I assume it helps future agents reason about the system and make future edits, and it gives them singular places to make changes that impact multiple components just like it would a human. But how much did it actually matter?
You're right my comment was off the cuff but I stand by it's logic. I didn't say Kovid was a terrible person, just not great. Having not done research into him specifically I just noted with the parent that certain qualities such as supposed abrasiveness often overlap with qualities I dislike, like using the Lenna image.
My point is that using the Lenna image is a signal, just as you rightly point out so is my comment. I know exactly what the image is and is used for. But I also think it's sad that it's politically charged to say using a Playboy image in a literally objectifying fashion as a test-subject by a women who's requested we don't use it is bad.
It's not a sudden ban, it's been an issue since ~2015. Fun fact I learnt in this, Goyal is totally open to changing it (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/661), it's simply no-one
Read the rest
changed it. I'll see if I can, thanks for the correct call-out.
Kitty does this as well. Looks like every terminal ships with their own terminfo nowadays. Apparently this is to work around the ncurses maintainer.
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2773
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2018-09/msg00...
In Build your own Command Line with ANSI escape codes (2016)Kitty has poor security
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084
In Ghostty – Terminal Emulator> Kitty I don't remember why I rejected.
Maybe worth another look at then? I'm far from a Kitty power user, but it does pretty much everything else I want it to, including working as a quake-style terminal[0]. And you can extend it with kittens[1] if you so desire. Also, the next release should presumably include smooth scrolling[2] which I'm quite looking forward to.
Maybe more than any one feature though, I appreciate the hard work that Kovid (the creator of Kitty) has done to tastefully add new VT standards and try to make terminals as useful as they can be in the 21st century.
[0] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/quick-access-termina...
[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens_intro/
[2] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/9330
In Ghostty – Terminal EmulatorSimilarly kitty is at 0.44.0 [0], zutty at 0.16.0 [1]
0.https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases/tag/v0.44.0
1. https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git
In State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant ChampionsMore than two, e.g. there’s also the Inline Images Protocol supported by iTerm2 and WezTerm.
Kovid documented his rationale at some length here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/33
In State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant ChampionsKitty phones home, providing information to the server. His insistence to keep this opt-out instead of opt-in, and abrasiveness towards whoever points this antifeature of Kitty out makes it all the more suspicious for me.
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544
In Using Emacs as a TUIYou might not want to have vendor lock-in on a terminal with opt-out telemetry.
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/3802
In Using Emacs as a TUIThe author of Kitty, Kovid Goyal, calls running tmux on local sessions an “anti-pattern” in the linked GitHub issue. I can’t help but find that a bit ironic, because the very first time I tried Kitty, I was in the middle of work when I discovered Arabic support was broken - https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/536 . I simply launched the macOS Terminal app, attached to the same tmux session, verified my Arabic text rendered correctly, and then closed Kitty. Without tmux, I would’ve been forced to recreate my entire workflow from scratch.
In Replacing tmux in my dev workflowFor Kitty I posted it on https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/8752, maybe we'll learn more!
In Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell[RFC] Allow terminal programs to display text in different sizes
1 points · Open discussionI quite liked Kitty, and wanted to keep using it. But the slow startup was a deal breaker for me. Even with `--single-instance` it was at least 5x that of st for me, which is noticeable for an app I use very frequently. Besides, I'm not a fan of running a single instance of any app, since if (when) it crashes, all my work is gone.
Then I had a look around their issue tracker, and noticed others complained about this too[1]. And the dismissive and defensive response from the author just rubbed me the wrong way.
[1]: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/330
In Suckless.org: software that sucks lesskitty is very close, which is impressive when you remember that the vast majority of the work is done by one guy (Kovid Goyal).
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues — 0.239% vs 0.137%
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues — 0.729% vs 0.317%
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/graphs/contributors
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