I wouldn’t say they’re pushing it. They’re adding AI features that, like it or not, are proving to be handy additions to a developer’s toolkit. But it’s not their core USP, and you can ignore it if you don’t care about it. In terms of speed I’ve found only Helix to match it.
Zed’s ‘live collaboration’ features, by contrast – yeah, no clue who the target user is there, since I grant everyone on my team to use whatever tools they feel most productive with.
And good thing too, for from the ashes of Atom rose Zed – and in case you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s awesome. Think VS code but 10000x faster.
Another happy Kitty user here!
I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.
Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.
Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.
I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.
Another vote for hx!
Getting a productive setup for Python work is a matter of a few extra lines of TOML. The pre-release version on master also allows for multiple LSPs per language, which means I can combine pyright with ruff.
The modal key chords are verb-object instead of object-verb. It’s not a main selling point to me. However, you get multi-cursors out of the box, which I’ve always found simpler than e.g. macros. In general, keybindings are discoverable. I learn something new every week.
All in all, despite a few rough edges, it’s a nice alternative to needing to get a PhD in neovim configuration to get anywhere remotely near the cool setups other people are rocking.
All my old macbooks eventually get the Linux treatment. On modern hardware, however, the trade-offs of non-macOS just don’t make sense to me.
For now, Apple Silicon has made a fanboy out of me. I can’t overstate how big the jump in performance felt going from intel to my first M1 – not to mention the improved thermals. And obviously part of that is due to excellent alignment between hardware and software.
Still, once that first M1 hits retirement, I’ll no doubt experience that familiar pang of gratitude towards those engineers that put up with the trade-offs of running Linux on it today in order to get everything working.
I give it a spin every month or so to see how it’s getting on. I’m on macOS.
Every time I walk away unimpressed, despite its maker’s very deserved esteemed reputation.
I’m probably not seeing something. What I do see, however, is that I can’t search my scrollback history, nor can I select text without a mouse.
Also, pressing
cmd+,on macOS opens the config inside TextEditor (yes, a separate GUI app) rather than in$EDITOR. It’s a small thing but I couldn’t figure out how to change it. Coming from Kitty, this drove me mad.I’m not sure who Ghostty is for. My feeling is it’s aiming to be an excellent, polished experience for casual terminal users. But I didn’t see anything that Kitty or just tmux anywhere can’t do.