Terminal Emulators

For the past couple of years, I have used a couple of terminal emulators for various operating systems.

As of now, I am currently using Kitty on both my linux and Mac setup for a couple reasons:

  • It is fast. It performs GPU-based rendering and there is no input lag. Prior to this, I have used iTerm2 on my Mac and there has always been an apparently input lag.

  • It is super easy to customise appearance and shortcuts and provides adequate documentation in its website.

  • It has an inbuilt tmux-like tiling window layout.

If you are curious, feel free to check out my customised kitty terminal config here

Before Kitty, I have used iTerm2 for around 2-3 years on my Macbook. iTerm2 is an extremely feature rich terminal emulator which can probably do anything you wish for in a terminal. The features I really like (that doesn't exist on Kitty) are

  • Hotkeys - I can register a global shortcut (eg, cmd+`) to bring up the terminal at anytime, which is extremely convenient for me.

  • Search - While most other terminal apps have search functionality, iTerm2 makes it very easy for the user (cmd+f and enter your search term). Other terminals require extra learning curves and typically more confusing steps.

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