Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?

Contents

Table of contents

• YouTube video
• Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?
  • The iTerm2 phase
  • The Alacritty phase
  • The Kitty phase
  • The WezTerm phase
  • The Ghostty phase
  • The man that broke our family apart
  • Moving back to Kitty
  • Going back to Ghostty?
• Community-driven promotion
• You’re a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn’t YouTube Ads enough?

YouTube video

Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?

Ghostty or Kitty?

Which one do I prefer?

This is a really tough call, because It’s the battle that has been going for centuries. Is this another one of those videos that at the end will tell you to reach your own conclusion?

Let’s start with a little bit on my terminal history…

The iTerm2 phase

It all started like a peasant. I was using macOS, and for some reason I ended up in iTerm2.

When you get initiated in the macOS cult, you have 2 options, the default stock macOS terminal, or iTerm2 (which is a macOS only terminal)

So I spent using iTerm2 for years and never felt the need to change. It has a lot of amazing features like

• Split panes
• Hotkey window
• Search
• Autocomplete
• Copy mode
• Paste history
• Instant replay
• Configurability via GUI (is this an advantage?)
• Tagged profiles
• Triggers
• Automatic profile switching
• Inline images
• Password manager
• Annotations
• Badges
• Captured output
• And more

But then, I explored outside the macOS bubble, and found out about Neovim. All these guys were pro, none of them were using iTerm2.

So I felt like a noob, and decided that my life had to change. I wanted to try one of them gigachad terminals that were not configured using a GUI, but instead a configuration file.

iTerm2 is mainly configured via GUI. You can also export a macOS PLIST file with all the settings, and your profiles in a json file.

But modifying this terminal via a config file is not nice and easy like other advanced terminals.

At that time is when I started migrating all my macOS setup to config files in my dots, so one of these new terminals was more suited for this.

I had 3 options. Alacritty, Kitty and WezTerm. The 3 are GPU accelerated.

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The Alacritty phase

First terminal I started with was Alacritty and I accompanied it with Tmux.

It was amazing, we rolled that way for quite some time. I had fully switched to Neovim at that point. And it was all good and gold.

Until I decided I wanted to view images for my Markdown files when in Neovim.

The problem is that alacritty does not support images, not sure if it does now, but it didn’t back then.

---

The Kitty phase

So, I started looking elsewhere, and I decided to go with Kitty. I liked kitty, it was alright, I didn’t feel it slower or anything, and it allowed me to view images inside Neovim, even when using Tmux.

I was a huge Tmux lover at the time, and I was of the mindset that tmux allowed me to quickly jump to a new terminal without having to learn the new terminal settings and keyboard shortcuts.

In case you don’t know what tmux is, it’s basically a terminal that runs inside your terminal. So it takes over and allows you to create panes, “tabs” which are called windows, also sessions, which are workspaces and many other things.

I had kitty configured, so that when I started kitty, tmux was automatically started, and everything was managed inside tmux.

I loved tmux more than my terminal back then, because it gave me all the features I really needed.

---

The WezTerm phase

So I rolled with kitty for some time, until people in the comments section started bringing up another terminal WezTerm.

Since I have no personality, self love, and self control, I decided to give WezTerm a try. They said it’s written in rust, which makes it faster, in theory.

I installed it, tried it, and felt slower. Until someone in my comments told me about the max_fps setting, which by default is set to 60 and makes it feel really slow and laggy compared to kitty.

Set that bad boy to 120 and it’s as fast as kitty. So I rolled that way for just a brief period of time.

WezTerm was also accompanied by the love of my life, tmux. So all my config was done in Tmux and I didn’t have to worry about learning WezTerm settings.

---

The Ghostty phase

But then, there was a new kid in town, Ghostty by Mitchell Hashimoto.

You remember when only a few users, that were hand picked by God himself, had access to Ghostty?

Everyone was switching and since I have no personality and self respect, I was going through FOMO, so I gained access to the beta, and switched too.

Shaders are really cool in Ghostty and performs quite well, its fast too.

I also used Ghostty with tmux all the time. Again, didn’t have to learn Ghostty’s settings as everything was handled in tmux.

And it was all rainbows and butterflies, we were a happy family. We didn’t need anything and we complimented each other really well.

---

The man that broke our family apart

Until a man jumped into my heart and broke our family apart…

During all this time, I had been doing interviews in my channel, and I had an interview with the creator of the Kitty terminal, Kovid Goyal.

If you don’t know who Kovid is, he’s also the creator of the Calibre e-book reader. He has a PhD in quantum computing from Caltech.

I thought to myself, “yeah, I’m past kitty, I live in the future with Ghostty, but anyway, let’s hear what this guy has to say”.

After the interview, my admiration for Kovid went to a new level, I didn’t know him before. I was now a fangirl.

But I kept using Ghostty, didn’t switch back to kitty. I didn’t have a reason to.

During the interview I told him that I would really love to have sessions in Kitty so I could try a workflow without tmux.

By sessions I mean multiplexing your terminal and have different workspaces open and easily switch between them, under a single terminal instance. I’ll demo this in the video.

So one day, I get an email from Kovid letting me know he had implemented sessions, the feature was in Beta, so that I give it a try and provide feedback.

---

Moving back to Kitty

I was hesitant at first, because this meant that I had to migrate all of my tmux config to kitty. I knew the time investment would be high. What if it didn’t work as good as Tmux for me?

I decided to give it a go, all that work that Kovid put in place for nothing. Didn’t feel correct on my part.

I’ve been using kitty sessions since around August 20th 2025, that’s a little over 3 months

I stopped using tmux ever since, as kitty provides me with all the functionality that I need.

I’m still missing to implement a few things, like the tmux-sshonizer script I had, which shows you a list of the devices in your SSH config file, and allows you to create a session for any of them.

If you want to understand how to setup kitty sessions, I have dedicated videos for that, so go and check them out.

Kitty also allows you to open your terminal scrollback in Neovim, so you can copy stuff from your command history, I haven’t migrated to Neovim 0.12, that’s why there are no colors, but that’s coming soon. This is way better than tmux copy mode, as its way more flexible. I Demo this in the video.

Going back to Ghostty?

Personally, I’d say my favorite terminal feature is sessions. Ghostty does not have sessions yet.

So if I want to switch back to Ghostty, I need to use Tmux sessions. And I don’t want to use tmux anymore as I don’t really need it.

There’s no middle man between my terminal and me anymore, and things have been good so far.

Do I have anything against tmux? Not at all, it was the love of my life. But I just don’t need it anymore.

What about keeping your process active on a remote server? I don’t care about that too much, but if I need tmux for that specific scenario, I would launch it as I still have it installed.

Remember that I did an interview with Kovid Part 2. There’s a lot of questions I missed in the first one due to time.

Community-driven promotion

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