Moving from Kitty to Ghostty and Trying Alacritty
When I first started using Linux, I was captivated by all the cool, personalized terminals with custom fonts, themes, and vibrant color schemes. Naturally, I wanted to create my own customized terminal experience. That's when I stumbled upon Kitty.
I chose Kitty based on the excellent impression it left after I browsed its documentation. It offered a great blend of GPU acceleration, customization, and modern features that made it stand out at the time.
The Quest for Better Performance and Cleaner Configuration
Over time, it wasn't dissatisfaction with Kitty that pushed me to explore alternatives, but rather curiosity about newer technologies. With the rise of languages like Rust and Zig, terminals built on these modern foundations promised faster performance, cleaner configuration files, and more straightforward customization.
This curiosity led me to Alacritty. It became especially popular in the Rust community, and I was eager to give it a try. I liked the customization options and how its configuration looked, but I ran into an issue. When rendering markdown files in Neovim, headers with different colors based on their depth didn't display correctly in Alacritty. For some reason, the colors wouldn't show up.
Discovering Ghostty: A Fresh Terminal Experience
Then, I came across Ghostty, a terminal built with Zig. As someone using macOS, I was excited to see that it was written in Swift, and I couldn't resist giving it a try. To my surprise, Ghostty was fast, the configuration was much easier to understand, and the documentation was as thorough as Kitty's.
I did encounter a minor issue with my font rendering. I had set UbuntuMono Nerd Font as my default, but it wasn't rendering correctly, it was looking a bit boldy. However, this wasn't a big issue since I wanted to change my font anyway. I switched to JetBrainsMono NFM SemiBold, and I'm really enjoying it now. It pairs wonderfully with the Rose Pine theme.
The issue I had with markdown rendering in Alacritty? It was gone in Ghostty.
Embracing Change: Why Ghostty Won Me Over
In the end, I made the switch to Ghostty, but I could've easily continued using Kitty both are excellent terminals. However, I was drawn to the new technologies, fresh features, and better updates that Ghostty promised.
I'm excited to see where this journey takes me as I continue using Ghostty. My Ghostty config can be found here: GitHub