I don't see why people are complaining about the UI. The calibre codebase is just Python and you can vibe code/customize a nicer UI for it in minutes. It's not like the core changes much. Their metadata resolution and Epub handling and (formerly DRM cracking) are best in class.
Vibe-coded or not, I prefer staying close to upstream unless I have very good reasons not to, and I would not want to have to half-heartedly maintain a UI fork of this. I would still be quite excited about an official visual overhaul, though
When I first used Calibre I thought it was a disorganised mess trying to cram too many features in one app.
Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.
I love Kitty. I've used it since discovering it in about 2019 and it strikes the right balance of things.
It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.
I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.
When I used Kitty, I hacked in a shader that'd render a crude glow around the letters so that I could use more translucent backgrounds and still have readable text. I have no idea where that code is - I haven't used Kitty for years. But that's the kind of thing that'd be great to do with the shader support.
When I was setting up Hyprland a few months ago, I chose ghostty because kitty rendered some icons badly. I think it was the Nerd Font. In a nutshell, kitty takes some rendering shortcuts that cause the bad rendering.
A significant differenciator is the dev/maintainer I'd say. No, really, hear me out :) I'd start with: this goes for almost any FOSS tool, not just this. Not saying one is good, one is not – but user choices, user feedback, interactions, deisgn goals/choices get affected (and sometimes influence) a lot based on how a dev/maintainer looks at their product and humans who use, or would use, their product – or contribute for that matter.
I haven't try Ghostty, but what I like about kitty is that it's performant, easy to customize (often it's just one line to add and you get that new feature you want), I like their defaults for tabs, layouts. It's not overwhelming but not too minimal either. I just find it's a sweet spot. I also somehow like the personality of the maintainer which seem to have a nice vision for the project. My major gripe is that it's not available on windows, but anyways I rarely use microslop products nowadays.
AFAIK, Ghostty is as performant. At least, on macOS. I used both and didn't see much difference. Decided to go with Ghostty as it feels more native than Kitty.
Very similar, about the only difference from user perspective is that Kitty has a slight content 'wobble' on macOS when resizing the window (this typically happens when the content is rendered via an MTKView or CAMetalLayer and its parent view's 'layerContentsPlacement' isn't anchored to one side during window resizing). That would be trivial to fix though.
PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).
TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.
Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).
> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).
This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".
Maybe, but it reminds me of the bad old days when Microsoft called their applications 'cross-platform', and then they just meant different flavours of Windows ;)
I believe I got rid of most of the issues with some .ssh setting which simply uses the normal xterm I believe. I can't check right at this moment, but apparently, simply using xterm and not the xterm-xkitty or what it's called does not actually make much problems when ssh-ing into a machine - not in my case at least.
It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.
Kitty is my go-to for the Linux desktop. I discovered it in an early stage and really liked it from the beginning. It’s great to see that the project continues to be developed so vigorously.
Nice. I love kitty. But somehow I just realized I'm stuck in 0.47 even though I'm on Fedora, it's like 6 months old. Excited to try the automated session restore.
It's nowhere as featureful as kitty, but i've been using cmder and it's good enough a replacement for the default windows terminal for daily use. But if you use powershell, i m not sure what a good replacement is (but it does work in cmder iirc).
https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.
What a legend.
Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.
Works amazingly well.
Looks amazingly bad.
Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs
Put forward your vision
Okay, that's pretty cool. How does it handle spacing though? Do the columns in ls/top/etc still line up?
It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.
I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.
gz on the release
I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/docs/faq.rst...
People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.
PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).
TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.
Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).
This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".
That's the one thing I always check first in a terminal because I have this pet project to run emulators in a terminal ;)
https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty
(works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)
If you need a GUI, just use a GUI.
I love kitty, have used it for a long while now and pretty happy, except for that one thing about ssh xterm - but even that is mostly minor.
Really cool to see such active development of an already perfectly capable and working software.
It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.
Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.
https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.