Urxvt vs kitty terminal emulator

derekagraham78

hey all
I been thinking about terminals, I been testing out urxtvt vs kitty, both are extremely configurable and can be made to look beautiful. urxtvt can be setup in daemon mode and use very extremely little memory 12 mb ram for 30 tabs. On the other hand kitty uses the GPU for processing commands, and running time tree / Kitty was actually about 8 secs to finish compared to nearly 20 secs on urxtvt and used about 350 MB of ram for 30 tabs. So extreme difference in ram use. What do ya guys think?

paracetamol

You can also evaluate alacritty. Solus has it packaged. Like kitty it is GPU accelerated and prides itself to be the fastest terminal emulator out there, although that claim is disputed and there was some controversy surrounding it. Nonetheless, it is fast and joy to use.

derekagraham78

paracetamol the test I did on alacritty did prove it was slightly faster then kitty. and the config seems good but i am trying to edit the config file and some things like title bar and borders arent changing. 🙁

tomocafe

I use alacritty when using Budgie and urxvt when using i3. Best of both worlds, I really enjoy both of them.

synth-ruiner

derekagraham78 where did you put your config file? mine works fine in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml

paracetamol

derekagraham78 Hm, decorations removal works for me under GNOME for any new instance of alacritty.

adurante Kitty is also very finicky about the video card drivers and refuses to work with my slightly older, but otherwise perfectly sufficient nvidia card, because the author follows OpenGL specification to the letter and refuses to add any workaround for cards with drivers that have bugs in their implementations of it. So the refusal to add important features seems to be a problem with both programs. 😉

derekagraham78

synth-ruiner
grahamd  _ cat .config/alacritty/alacritty.yml |grep decora
Window decorations Values fordecorations: Values fordecorations(macOS only): decorations: none grahamd  ~ 
only decorations: none is uncommented
formating in the forum i had to remove the #

adurante

derekagraham78 just my 2c as someone who compared both. kitty was much easier to configure and is more feature complete. Alacrity has their claim to fame as "the fastest terminal there is" but they really only beat kitty by refusing a lot of additional features which in my opinion makes kitty better since I wouldn't notice such a miniscule difference in runtime anyway

synth-ruiner

derekagraham78 is line 15 (window:) commented? if so, you'll need to uncomment it for any child properties to work. 🙂

adurante

paracetamol really they don't add work arounds for cards it doesn't like? That makes me sad, it is one of my favorite small projects (IIRC its still only one guy). Definitely can't fault you for going with something that works for you over something that doesn't tho hahaha

derekagraham78

synth-ruiner thanks that did it, but then I realized I wouldnt be able to move the window so I went back to full 🙂

synth-ruiner

just a note to others in case this helps anyone: in both kitty and alacritty I had trouble connecting to remote servers via SSH until I set the TERM variable to xterm-256color in the config.

paracetamol

derekagraham78 You can move windows that lack decorations by holding down the left mouse button and the Super key simultaneously. At least in the WMs/DEs I am familiar with.

synth-ruiner

derekagraham78 yeah, I'm the same way - I like the way a terminal window looks without the title bar but I need to be able to move it around easily 😁 on my work computer and laptop I use i3 (tiling window manager) so I don't have window decorations anyway- looks nice.

paracetamol

adurante Yeah. But it's the same guy who wrote Calibre. If you're not familiar with its development, his idea of dealing with Python 2's - the original language in which Calibre was written in - approaching end of life was not porting the project to Python 3, but to maintain a private fork of Python 2. Luckily he eventually abandoned that idea thanks to the pressure from the community, but that fellow has strong and unique opinions about software development. 😉

derekagraham78

my only gripe with alacritty is i cant get the opacity to work right on budgie. Its completely solid. On kitty it works just right. Hmm I guess I will have to use Kitty 🙁

synth-ruiner

derekagraham78 in my config I have line 293 uncommented: background_opacity: 0.5 - you?

derekagraham78

synth-ruiner its uncommented 0.9 and i tried 0.5 but still solid as can be. On Budgie

synth-ruiner

uploaded my config if you want to try that.

synth-ruiner

oh - you may need a compositor like Compton installed? I forget

paracetamol

synth-ruiner Shouldn't be needed as Mutter which Budgie relies upon is (partially) a compositor. Transparency in alacritty works for me on GNOME, which also runs on Mutter.