terminals ghostty-to-kitty initial commit

Author: linkarzu

_posts/terminals/2025-11-29-ghostty-to-kitty.md

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+---
+title: Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?
+description: >-
+  Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty feels like a betrayal. Ghostty is new.
+  Kitty is proven. Both are fast. Both are GPU based. Both try to replace the
+  old terminals that we tolerated for years. This video is my full story from
+  iTerm2 to Alacritty to Kitty to WezTerm to Ghostty and all the way back to
+  Kitty. I show what pushed me out of each terminal and what made Kitty stand
+  out again after Ghostty took over my setup.
+image:
+  path: ./../../assets/img/imgs/251129-thux-ghostty-to-kitty.avif
+date: '2025-11-29 06:10:00 +0000'
+categories:
+  - terminals
+tags:
+  - ghostty
+  - tutorial
+  - youtube
+  - video
+---
+## Contents
+
+### Table of contents
+
+<!-- toc -->
+
+- [YouTube video](#youtube-video)
+- [Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?](#switching-from-ghostty-back-to-kitty)
+  * [The iTerm2 phase](#the-iterm2-phase)
+  * [The Alacritty phase](#the-alacritty-phase)
+  * [The Kitty phase](#the-kitty-phase)
+  * [The WezTerm phase](#the-wezterm-phase)
+  * [The Ghostty phase](#the-ghostty-phase)
+  * [The man that broke our family apart](#the-man-that-broke-our-family-apart)
+  * [Moving back to Kitty](#moving-back-to-kitty)
+  * [Going back to Ghostty?](#going-back-to-ghostty)
+- [Community-driven promotion](#community-driven-promotion)
+- [You're a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn't YouTube Ads enough?](#youre-a-fraud-why-do-you-ask-for-money-isnt-youtube-ads-enough)
+
+<!-- tocstop -->
+
+## YouTube video
+
+{% include embed/youtube.html id='sRTL0mH6j9U' %}
+
+## Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?
+
+Ghostty or Kitty?
+
+Which one do I prefer?
+
+This is a really tough call, because It's the battle that has been going for
+centuries. Is this another one of those videos that at the end will tell you to
+reach your own conclusion?
+
+Let's start with a little bit on my terminal history...
+
+### The iTerm2 phase
+
+It all started like a peasant. I was using macOS, and for some reason I ended up
+in iTerm2.
+
+When you get initiated in the macOS cult, you have 2 options, the default stock
+macOS terminal, or iTerm2 (which is a macOS only terminal)
+
+So I spent using iTerm2 for years and never felt the need to change. It has a
+lot of amazing features like
+
+- Split panes
+- Hotkey window
+- Search
+- Autocomplete
+- Copy mode
+- Paste history
+- Instant replay
+- Configurability via GUI (is this an advantage?)
+- Tagged profiles
+- Triggers
+- Automatic profile switching
+- Inline images
+- Password manager
+- Annotations
+- Badges
+- Captured output
+- And more
+
+But then, I explored outside the macOS bubble, and found out about Neovim. All
+these guys were pro, none of them were using iTerm2.
+
+So I felt like a noob, and decided that my life had to change. I wanted to try
+one of them gigachad terminals that were not configured using a GUI, but instead
+a configuration file.
+
+`iTerm2` is mainly configured via GUI. You can also export a macOS `PLIST` file
+with all the settings, and your profiles in a `json` file.
+
+But modifying this terminal via a config file is not nice and easy like other
+advanced terminals.
+
+At that time is when I started migrating all my macOS setup to config files in
+my dots, so one of these new terminals was more suited for this.
+
+I had 3 options. Alacritty, Kitty and WezTerm. The 3 are GPU accelerated.
+
+---
+
+### The Alacritty phase
+
+First terminal I started with was Alacritty and I accompanied it with Tmux.
+
+It was amazing, we rolled that way for quite some time. I had fully switched to
+Neovim at that point. And it was all good and gold.
+
+Until I decided I wanted to view images for my Markdown files when in Neovim.
+
+The problem is that alacritty does not support images, not sure if it does now,
+but it didn't back then.
+
+---
+
+### The Kitty phase
+
+So, I started looking elsewhere, and I decided to go with Kitty. I liked kitty,
+it was alright, I didn't feel it slower or anything, and it allowed me to view
+images inside Neovim, even when using Tmux.
+
+I was a huge Tmux lover at the time, and I was of the mindset that tmux allowed
+me to quickly jump to a new terminal without having to learn the new terminal
+settings and keyboard shortcuts.
+
+In case you don't know what tmux is, it's basically a terminal that runs inside
+your terminal. So it takes over and allows you to create panes, "tabs" which are
+called windows, also sessions, which are workspaces and many other things.
+
+I had kitty configured, so that when I started kitty, tmux was automatically
+started, and everything was managed inside tmux.
+
+I loved tmux more than my terminal back then, because it gave me all the
+features I really needed.
+
+---
+
+### The WezTerm phase
+
+So I rolled with kitty for some time, until people in the comments section
+started bringing up another terminal `WezTerm`.
+
+Since I have no personality, self love, and self control, I decided to give
+WezTerm a try. They said it's written in rust, which makes it faster, in theory.
+
+I installed it, tried it, and felt slower. Until someone in my comments told me
+about the `max_fps` setting, which by default is set to `60` and makes it feel
+really slow and laggy compared to kitty.
+
+Set that bad boy to `120` and it's as fast as kitty. So I rolled that way for
+just a brief period of time.
+
+WezTerm was also accompanied by the love of my life, tmux. So all my config was
+done in Tmux and I didn't have to worry about learning WezTerm settings.
+
+---
+
+### The Ghostty phase
+
+But then, there was a new kid in town, `Ghostty` by Mitchell Hashimoto.
+
+You remember when only a few users, that were hand picked by God himself, had
+access to Ghostty?
+
+Everyone was switching and since I have no personality and self respect, I was
+going through FOMO, so I gained access to the beta, and switched too.
+
+Shaders are really cool in Ghostty and performs quite well, its fast too.
+
+I also used Ghostty with tmux all the time. Again, didn't have to learn
+Ghostty's settings as everything was handled in tmux.
+
+And it was all rainbows and butterflies, we were a happy family. We didn't need
+anything and we complimented each other really well.
+
+---
+
+### The man that broke our family apart
+
+Until a man jumped into my heart and broke our family apart...
+
+During all this time, I had been doing interviews in my channel, and I had an
+interview with the creator of the Kitty terminal, Kovid Goyal.
+
+If you don't know who Kovid is, he's also the creator of the `Calibre` e-book
+reader. He has a PhD in quantum computing from Caltech.
+
+I thought to myself, "yeah, I'm past kitty, I live in the future with Ghostty,
+but anyway, let's hear what this guy has to say".
+
+After the interview, my admiration for Kovid went to a new level, I didn't know
+him before. I was now a fangirl.
+
+But I kept using Ghostty, didn't switch back to kitty. I didn't have a reason
+to.
+
+During the interview I told him that I would really love to have sessions in
+Kitty so I could try a workflow without tmux.
+
+By sessions I mean multiplexing your terminal and have different workspaces open
+and easily switch between them, under a single terminal instance. I'll demo this
+in the video.
+
+So one day, I get an email from Kovid letting me know he had implemented
+sessions, the feature was in Beta, so that I give it a try and provide feedback.
+
+---
+
+### Moving back to Kitty
+
+I was hesitant at first, because this meant that I had to migrate all of my tmux
+config to kitty. I knew the time investment would be high. What if it didn't
+work as good as Tmux for me?
+
+I decided to give it a go, all that work that Kovid put in place for nothing.
+Didn't feel correct on my part.
+
+I've been using kitty sessions since around August 20th 2025, that's a little
+over 3 months
+
+I stopped using tmux ever since, as kitty provides me with all the functionality
+that I need.
+
+I'm still missing to implement a few things, like the `tmux-sshonizer` script I
+had, which shows you a list of the devices in your SSH config file, and allows
+you to create a session for any of them.
+
+If you want to understand how to setup kitty sessions, I have dedicated videos
+for that, so go and check them out.
+
+Kitty also allows you to open your terminal scrollback in Neovim, so you can
+copy stuff from your command history, I haven't migrated to Neovim 0.12, that's
+why there are no colors, but that's coming soon. This is way better than tmux
+copy mode, as its way more flexible. I Demo this in the video.
+
+### Going back to Ghostty?
+
+Personally, I'd say my favorite terminal feature is sessions. Ghostty does not
+have sessions yet.
+
+So if I want to switch back to Ghostty, I need to use Tmux sessions. And I don't
+want to use tmux anymore as I don't really need it.
+
+There's no middle man between my terminal and me anymore, and things have been
+good so far.
+
+Do I have anything against tmux? Not at all, it was the love of my life. But I
+just don't need it anymore.
+
+What about keeping your process active on a remote server? I don't care about
+that too much, but if I need tmux for that specific scenario, I would launch it
+as I still have it installed.
+
+Remember that I did an interview with Kovid Part 2. There's a lot of questions I
+missed in the first one due to time.
+
+## Community-driven promotion
+
+Do you want to promote yourself in my channel? I'm not talking about a company
+like notion, brilliant, and all those other ones we're using to seeing. I'm
+talking about you as a person, do you have a project, course, youtube channel or
+product and trying to reach an audience?
+
+If interested, pricing and all the details can be found
+[in this other page](https://chirpy.home.linkarzu.com/about/#community-driven-promotion){:target="\_blank"}
+
+## You're a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn't YouTube Ads enough?
+
+- I explain all of this in the "about me page" link below:
+  - [youre-a-fraud-why-do-you-ask-for-money-isnt-youtube-ads-enough](https://linkarzu.com/about/#youre-a-fraud-why-do-you-ask-for-money-isnt-youtube-ads-enough){:target="\_blank"}
+  - Above you'll also find links to my discord, social media, etc
+