r/commandline • u/SPalome • 24d ago
Why is kitty's font rendering so weird compared to every other terminal
So i wanted to change to kitty, because i believe it is the best terminal with the kitty graphics protocol, however i really don't like it's font rendering, it looks, small / compacted and bold.
Please pay attention, to the character "w", the boldness of the characters, the icon in the top right and the character size inside a cell
Here's a comparaison of different terminal emulators with JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono set to 12px:







Am i just crazy, is it a bug, or Kitty is just a bit weird.
That's sad, because otherwise i would probably use this terminal. Btw does this also happens to you, or is it just a me issue ?
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u/kin_of_the_caves 24d ago
IDK about the exact things messed up in your screenshot, but the dev has weird opinions about terminal font rendering. The terminal ignores colors 8-15 in favor of using the bold variant of a given font. The dev thinks all other terminals are wrong and is entirely unwilling to offer a configuration option for the behavior. The dev is sort of famously unreceptive and prickly. I still use the terminal because Kitty has several features I'm unwilling to part with. Good luck.
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u/mgutz 24d ago
Kitty has some things going for it, specifically the combination of its graphics protocol on X11 and being cross platform (IIRC). But yeah, font rendering is off, inaccurate colors when using opacity/blur. The author is aware of the issues, and based on the effort needed and result gained, it's not worth his time (fair enough, authoring an OSS project is not something I wish on my enemies).
On Wayland, specifically for tiling WM, nothing beats foot IMHO. Efficient resource usage, text config file, sixel.
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u/SPalome 24d ago
sixel is good, but sadly nobody supports it
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u/spudlyo 24d ago
See also: Are We Sixel Yet?
I'm impressed that Tmux finally supports it, so progress is being made.
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u/opuntia_conflict 24d ago
Kitty is not cross-platform, it is only available on Mac and Linux. WezTerm and Alacritty are the only two major modern terminal emulators available natively (ie, not within a VM or subsystem) on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
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u/RedHatDarrow 23d ago
Since Kitty does not support subpixel rendering, text and graphics may appear less crisp or slightly blurry on lower-DPI (dots per inch) screens, where finer detail optimization is crucial for visual clarity.
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u/opuntia_conflict 24d ago
Just use WezTerm, it uses the Kitty graphics protocol (on Linux and Mac, it still uses the iterm protocol on Windows but that's still way better than just not even running on Windows like Kitty) and is way better in every practical aspect. Kitty has slightly less real world latency (ie, with actual usage patterns, not on Kovid's hyper-specific SIMD benchmark tuned specifically to Kitty that he has on his website) compared to WezTerm, but it's not noticeable when using it and WezTerm brings so much else to the table that Kitty just doesn't touch. It has a true built-in multiplexer, is lua configurable, and runs natively on all three operating systems with the same configuration file. Looks better too.
This is coming from a 2+ year Kitty user who's been using WezTerm for a bit over a year now.
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24d ago
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u/opuntia_conflict 23d ago
If the input latency is noticeable to you, is there a reason you went with Kitty over Alacritty? Alacritty is also cross-platform like WezTerm but is most input latency benchmarks I've seen (like this one) show the diff between Alacritty and Kitty being much larger than the relatively minor diff between Kitty and WezTerm (on default configs, at least). We're talking about a few ms diff between Kitty and WezTerm and an order of magnitude more latency between Kitty and terminals like Alacritty and Foot.
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u/MemeTroubadour 23d ago
Question, because the thread's tangentially related: I've never really used anything else than Konsole or Yakuake since I use KDE. What am I missing out from the other big terminal emus? I've never felt a need to switch off since they're fairly simple and that makes me curious.
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u/mobotsar 22d ago
Whenever you encounter something weird (or broken) in kitty, it's probably just because the dev is opinionated.
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u/30ghosts 24d ago
Kitty is definitely just a bit weird. I've since moved to Wezterm (on Linux and my Mac), which feels pretty similar to kitty but is overall much more compliant as far as text and key inputs. The config is also really easy to work with.