 So I've been a longtime fan of Alacrity the terminal emulator and for good reason I feel it's been a very good terminal emulator for me Basically since the time I started using it. I've had no problems with it really whatsoever I know a lot of people don't care for it because it doesn't Have certain features, but I've always found it just fine I don't find it slow it has all the features that I want and I've used it for so long that my configuration file is Exactly the way that I want it, but recently I have been having some problems with Alacrity Namely that when I use Ranger and I want to have image preview working It doesn't actually work and I don't know if that's a problem with Alacrity or if it's a problem with uberzug or whatever It's called whatever it was. I couldn't get it to fix even after trying to do some trouble troubleshooting on it so I ended up looking for alternatives and While I was spelunking my way through the Ranger configuration file I noticed that kitty has a built-in option for image preview You don't have to have any Extraneous application in order to get it to work. So I decided to give kitty a try now I have used kitty before in the past a couple times actually and Honestly, the thing that has always turned me away from kitty is the Configuration file because if you've ever seen the default kitty configuration file and especially if you've opened it in Vim You'll know that it starts off with everything folded now the very first time I tried kitty I had no clue that Vim folds even existed I had no clue that that was a thing and I had no clue how to Unfold anything in in Vim. I looked at it. I was like what the hell is that? Well since when does Vim do this nonsense, right? I had no clue, right? I was completely lost now. Obviously since that time. I've learned more I'm more of a Vim user now than I was back then and I know how to unfold Basically anything that I want inside of them if I need to I still don't like them fold It's probably my least favorite feature of them out there, but you know, that's kind of beside the point So that's the reason why I've never actually used kitty in the past is because I really didn't care for the configuration file the way they do it is by basically putting all of the kitty documentation right inside of the configuration file and While I don't mind comments inside of a configuration file. I think that they can be useful I don't want it to be a novel right the default configuration file for kitty is something like four or five maybe even six thousand words maybe even more and it's just a really long configuration file and the vast vast Majority of that is comments. It's the basically the entirety of the config the kitty documentation Right there inside of the configuration file and it always drove me nuts because I prefer a more minimal Configuration file with a really good man page now kitty has a good man page It also has spectacular documentation on their website So the fact that they kind of decided to do double-duty and have all that stuff inside of the configuration file Always just kind of put me off on the wrong foot But I decided I was going to try to look past all of that stuff and for the last week I have been using kitty as my default terminal emulator on both my main machine and my standing desk Now I don't use it in my VMs because my VMs I use Tile X but Everywhere else I've been using kitty and I have some thoughts. So first let me show you what my kitty looks like So we're just gonna go ahead and go here. This is kitty and it looks like a terminal emulator You know, there's nothing special here in terms of look and feel I will say that it works fantastically well with pot pie wall So if I wanted to change to a different wallpaper, I could do that. So let's just you know change to I don't know It doesn't really matter. We'll change this one here and there we go Well, it looks like phenomenally like the last one Let's see if we can terms out all of the cyberpunk wallpapers I have look kind of the same cyberpunk leases the sit on that one will work. Yeah, there we go So as you can see kitty looks very good with pie wall enabled It also has a ton of built-in color schemes So if you wanted to use kitty But you don't want to have to mess around with changing the color schemes in the configuration file You can get to a whole like something like 700 different color schemes or something like that Some astonishing number of color schemes and you can change them right inside of the terminal. It's very easy So that is nice. I don't use it up because I use pie wall But that's one feature that I found was really cool now as you can see in my scratchpad here image previews work very well in ranger and that's because kitty has that kind of stuff built right in which is nice It means you no longer have to go searching for a third-party Application or plug-in in order to get image preview to work inside a ranger I've been using uberzug for years, but that's no longer being maintained and it's very not stable across different distributions It works fine on arch. It doesn't work fine on fedora half the time It I've had problems with it on a boon too So uberzug is always a big issue for me and it's been even more so since it was abandoned now There is another option for image preview instead of ranger w3m works, but that is very Not that great if you were to move the cursor at all half the time the image would disappear It's not fantastic, but with kitty it has image previews built in. I no longer need that third-party support It works very well. That's the main reason why I decided to switch to kitty once once I did Switch to kitty. I discovered something that made my day now Alacrity as far as I'm aware does not have tab support It would shock me if it did and if somebody in the comments sections Yeah, Alacrity has tabs and you never discovered I feel really foolish, but I don't think it does kitty However does have tabs if I control T now I've changed the key bindings So your key bindings may differ if you use kitty, but as you can see down here along the bottom I now have tabs and I can actually click between them if I want or I can hit control tab And it'll switch between them so I can run h top here and I can switch back and forth between these two tabs and That's awesome. Everybody knows who watches my channel knows that I love tabs right now I have something like 230 tabs open in Firefox. It's just don't judge me. I'm doing a whole bunch of research for project So half of those will go away, but the point is I have a ton of tabs I love tabs and everything if you see my file manager. I have tabs open in my file manager constantly. That's crusader It's wonderful. You should try it the fact that my terminal emulator has tabs is awesome Now, I know what you guys are thinking There's our there are a ton of terminal emulators out there that have tabs enabled or have tabs support So if I open up like Tilex or something, I think I have Tilex installed Yeah, Tilex has tabs support so I can open up another tab here in in Tilex and it works just fine and You know, I expect there to be tabs in a GUI terminal emulator So like GNOME terminal or console or whatever both of those are GUI terminal emulators And I expect them to have tabs. This is not a GUI terminal emulator This is a regular terminal emulator that doesn't have any GUI support The fact that it has tabs built in really freaking cool Now I understand the vast majority of you are like Matt what that what is your obsession with tabs? See the thing is is I like things to stay open. I'm stupid that way. It's not a healthy way of using my computer I understand that I've talked about my tab hoarding problem in a recent blog post. I can't help it It's just kind of the way that I work now. I don't have, you know, like hundreds and hundreds of tabs open in a terminal I have right now four that I've been using. I have my one that I've just been messing around with sxhkdrc here I have my kitty configuration file, which I'll show you here in a minute And then I just have a blanket blank tab along with my ranger I really like kitty to be honest with you once I managed to get the configuration file Down to an unreasonable looking thing, right? This is my configuration file I took out most of the comments the only place where I did not take the comments out were the keyboard shortcuts I've left those because I still want to go through and do some configuration stuff here I've left all those comments there for now But for the most part I've gone and taken out all the the comments and documentation from The default configuration and made it my own as much as possible Now you can source other files from here So if you wanted to source a color scheme, you could do that Like you would do in a yaml file for a lagerty You could do that as well And it's just a very easy to use configuration file there's nothing All that you know special here It's just a You know a setting and then a value a setting value pair a key pair I think it's what they call them and it's just very easy to do And because the default configuration file is so well commented You know Despite the fact that I don't really like all that all the all those comments It's very easy to know what it does And that's the thing about kitty is that it has a ton of customization And configuration that I haven't even scratched the surface of yet So on their website where the actual documentation lives You can find all this customization that you can do including different window layouts because apparently Kitty can be a tiling window manager if you wanted to You can change all the normal terminal stuff like scroll back and mouse and stuff like that But also has extensions things called kittens Now I haven't seen any kittens here that I particularly care for other than the Changing of the colors all the rest of these don't really do anything for me But the fact that it has extensions that you could theoretically build for yourself is pretty cool Kitty has just a ton of different options Like I said that I haven't even scratched the surface of yet So over the course of the next month or so I'm going to definitely dive into more of these options and stuff like that So that's going to be something that's going to be entertaining for me for quite a while because I'm a nerd And I like to do most of my work inside of a terminal emulator. So Uh, give me some give me a new toy to play with a new toy to customize And I'm going to spend a lot of time with it in terms of speed and stuff like that I don't notice any difference between kitty and alacrity They both seem equally fast to me, but I don't spend all my time compiling things And building code and all that stuff. So anything that is resource intensive I really wouldn't notice because I don't do a lot of that stuff in terms of running actual programs inside of the terminal I've not had any problems. I've been using nano now for a week with fairly large documentation And articles and stuff like that that I use for work And I haven't noticed it being slow at all now I never noticed alacrity being slow at either when you when I was doing those things. So Whether there's actually a performance benefit for kitty. I'm not sure. I haven't seen one also. That's not how you quit quit nano for F's sake I've been using it for a week and I'm still doing ZQ and colon wq and half the time I want to move down in a document. I'm using hjkl in order to move around It's a week later. I'm still not okay with nano, but that's for another video. Good lord Anyways, I'm switching to kitty I don't have a lot to say about other than I think that it's really nice And I'm going to be spending some more time with it I do want to say that the number of options that it has is kind of overwhelming even for someone who enjoys customization It's not a simple terminal. Now the defaults seem to be pretty good So if you don't want to delve into the customer, you know the the configuration at all you could just use it It would be fine And then you can do the documentation Maybe learn how to change colors or something that if you just only wanted to do that You could just be that type of person and be happy I'm the type of person who wants to configure stuff So it can be quite overwhelming if you find go in and find that there are You know a thousand different options that you can mess around with I like that But like I said, it can be confusing one thing I will say is that it is the documentation is exemplary So if you have any problems Chances are in the documentation somewhere It's going to tell you exactly what you need to do how to fix the things you need to fix How to customize the things you want to customize and so on So that's it for this video just a short one on on kitty I think that it's a really good terminal emulator and I'm happy that I switched It took me a while to make the switch to be honest with you I really like the lacquerty now If you guys remember if you watched my channel for any amount of time, you know way way back My favorite terminal emulator was termite Now I had a love affair with termite similar to my love affair with tabs and crusader Termite was my jam. It was my favorite terminal emulator. I really liked the configuration file I spent a long time making it my own and it was really really good Then it got abandoned right and that was my cue to switch to lacquerty And I was very resistant to that change like very very resistant. I didn't want to Use a lacquerty. I thought that it was inferior in every way It took me a long time to come around to the fact that a lacquerty was really pretty good Right, I really enjoyed the automatic refresh of the configuration file that a lacquerty had You know, you make a change in the configuration file and a lacquerty automatically Would take on those changes after you saved the file. That was really cool That's the one feature of kitty that I truly miss. I really wish that kitty would do that I have done some googling and found that there is a key binding that you can use to refresh the configuration I don't know if it works. I haven't actually tried it yet. I just found it like five minutes ago So that's something that I'll be looking into but it doesn't seem to be as automatic as the lacquerty version of that was And that's a little bit of a shame But outside of that comparing them the two of the terminal emulators They seem fairly comparable for me personally you guys got to remember. I'm not a programmer So any programming features that they had that differ between the two of them. I can't speak on I know from people that I've talked to that kitty supports ligatures and that a lacquerty does not I'm not sure what that means. So Well, I know I vaguely I'm vaguely aware of what it means, but I couldn't explain it to anybody So if that makes sense to you, just know that fact Anyways, that's it for this video. If you have comments on kitty, you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. 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