Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty?

Ghosty 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. It all started like a peasant. I was using Mac OS and for some reason I ended up in it term 2. When you get initiated in the Mac OS cold, you have two options. The default stock Mac OS terminal or iTerm 2 which is a Mac OS only terminal. So I spent using it term 2 for years and I never felt the need to change. It has a lot of amazing features like for example split panes, hotkey window, search, autocomplete, happy mode, paste history, instant replay, configurability via GUI. Is this an advantage or disadvantage? We'll talk about this in a little while. Packed profiles, triggers, automatic profile switching, inline images, password manager, annotations, badges, captured output, and more. But then I explored outside the Mac OS bubble and found out about any of them. All of these guys were pro. None of them were using iTerm. So I felt like a noob and decided that my life had to change. I wanted to try one of them gigachhat terminals that were not configured using a guey but instead a configuration file. Itterm 2 is mainly configured via guey. You can also export a Mac OS list file with all the settings and your profiles in a JSON file. But modifying this terminal via configuration file is not nice and easy like other advanced terminals. At that time is when I started migrating all my Mac OS setup to config files in my thoughts. So one of these new terminals was more suited for this. So I had three options elacrity kitty and westerm. The three of them are GPU accelerated. The first terminal I started with was elacrity and I accompanied it with T-Max. It was amazing rolled that way for quite some time. I had fully switched to Neoim at that point and it was all good and gold until I decided that I wanted to view images for Marmite files when inside Neoim. The problem is that Alaci does not support images. Not sure if it does now, but it didn't back then. So, I started looking elsewhere and decided to go with Kitty. I like Kitty. It was all right. didn't feel slow or anything and it allowed me to view images inside Newm even when using T-Max. I was a huge T-Max lover at the time and I was of the mindset that T-Max allow 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 T-Max is, it's basically a terminal that runs inside your terminal. And it basically takes over allows you to create tabs which are called windows. It allows you to create sessions which are basically like workspaces and many other things. I had Kitty configured so that when I started Kitty, T-Max was automatically started as well and it took over and everything was managed inside T-Max all the settings. I love T-Max more than my terminal back then because it gave me all the features that I really needed. So, I rolled with Kitty for quite some time until people in the comments started bringing another terminal, Westerm. Since I have no personality, self-love, and self-control, I decided to give Western a try. They said it's written in Rust, which makes it faster in theory. I installed it, tried it, and it felt slower until someone in the comments told me about the max FPS settings, which by default is set to 60, and that 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 with Western for a brief period of time. Western was also accompanied by the love of my life, T-Max. So, all of my settings were managed in T-Max and I didn't have to worry about learning any of the western settings and configs. But then there was a new kid in town, Ghosty by Mitchell Hashimoto. You remember when only a few users that were handpicked by God himself had access to Ghosty? 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 I switched too. Shaders are really cool in Ghosty. It performs quite well and it's a really fast terminal. I also use Ghosty with T-Max all the time. Again, didn't have to learn Ghosty settings as everything was handled in T-Max and it was all rainbows and butterflies. We were a happy family. We didn't need anything and we complimented each other really well until a man jumped into my pants. I'm sorry, 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, Kovit Goyal. If you don't know who Kovit is, he's also the creator of the Caliber ebook reader. He has a PhD in quantum computing from Caltech. I thought to myself at the moment, I'm way past Kitty at the moment because I'm living in the future with Ghosty. But anyway, let's hear what this guy has to say. After the interview, my admiration for CO went up to a new level. I didn't know him before. I was now a fan girl, but I kept using Ghosty. Didn't switch back to Kitty. I didn't have a reason to. During the interview, I told them that I would really love to try sessions in Kitty so that I could try living in a workflow without T-Max. By sessions, I mean multiplexing your terminal and have different workspaces open and easily switch between them under a single terminal instance. Let me quickly demo sessions in Kitty. Notice that I'm in my daily note right now, which I bring up with a single key. This is a Kitty session. What if I want to jump to my dot files? I just press a key in my keyboard and it takes me there. What if I want to open my kitty configuration file in this session? I just open it and I'm there. What if I want to bring up a different session, my blog post, I press another key map in my keyboard, brings it up. Let's say that I want to bring up this rising article. I just look it up and it's there. This is my blog post. What if I want to jump back to the previous session with the single key? I can go back to my dot files. I can switch back and forth between the last two sessions. I can jump to my daily note as well with another key map. So, as you notice, sessions basically are workspaces and they allow you to switch between the projects that you use the most really easily. Ideally, a key map away from each one of the most used projects. Now, this is just a small demo on sessions. I don't want to spend too long here because I have dedicated videos about sessions. If you want to learn more about sessions, go and check out the videos in my channel and I explain everything in detail there. So, one day I get an email from Coid letting me know that he had implemented sessions in Kitty. So, he wanted me to give them a try because they were in beta and provide feedback. So, I did. I was hesitant at first because this meant that I had to migrate all of my T-Max config to Kitty. I knew the time investment would be high. What if it didn't work as good as T-Max for me? But I decided to give it a go. All the work that CO put in sessions didn't feel good on my part to just leave it there. I have been using Kitty Sessions since around August 20th, 2025. That's a little over 3 months. I stopped using T-Max ever since as Giddy provides all of the functionality that I really need. I'm still missing to implement a few things like the T-Max SSH and Isiser 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. Like I said before, if you want to learn more about sessions, go and checking my videos. I explain everything in detail there. Giddy also allows you to open your terminal, scroll back in neoimm so you can copy stuff from your command history. I haven't migrated to neob 0.12 that's why there are no colors but that's coming soon. This is way better than Timmax copy mode as it's way more flexible. Personally, I would say that my favorite terminal feature is sessions. And Ghosty doesn't have sessions yet. So, if I want to switch back to Ghosty, I have to use T-Max sessions, and I just don't want to use T-Max anymore. This I don't really need it. There's no middleman between my terminal and me anymore. And the things have been good so far. Do I have anything against Demox? 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 T-Max for that specific scenario, I would launch it as I still have it installed. Okay, folks. So, the last thing that I want to do is thank the CEOs, web23, web23.com. I also want to thank the executive producers, the YouTube members. Anyone that donates and coffee or in the live streams, really appreciate all the help. If you don't want to become a member, it's fine. Remember to give this video a thumbs up, share the video, subscribe to the channel, and all that stuff. Also, remember that I did an interview with COVID part two. There's a lot of questions that I missed in the interview part one, so go and check that out. All right. So, I hope you learned something from this video. I'll see you in the next one.

Switching from Ghostty back to Kitty feels like a betrayal. Ghostty is new. Kitty is proven. Both are fast. Both are GPU based. Both try to replace the old terminals that we tolerated for years. This video is my full story from iTerm2 to Alacritty to Kitty to WezTerm to Ghostty and all the way back to Kitty. I show what pushed me out of each terminal and what made Kitty stand out again after Ghostty took over my setup. I explain how I used terminals before Neovim entered the picture and why everything changed when I moved my entire workflow into config files. I talk about my obsession with tmux and how it shaped my decisions for a long time. I show what triggered my switch to Ghostty and why the hype pulled me in. And then I show the exact moment where everything changed after the interview with Kovid Goyal and after the introduction of Kitty sessions. If you want to understand the real difference between Ghostty and Kitty and what happens to your workflow when you remove tmux from the middle this video gives you a full breakdown. I also show how I use Kitty sessions, how I open my scrollback in Neovim, and how the shift away from tmux changed my daily work. If you want the honest experience of both terminals and the mindset behind each switch this is the video. You wanna promote yourself in my channel: https://linkarzu.com/about/#community-driven-promotion ------------------------------------------------- My keyboards playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZWMav2s1MZRb9W2p6o2mz4xqzN7ohIfu ------------------------------------------------- My Kanata playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZWMav2s1MZRLkd4l7cG5iAX3b7IgaevH ------------------------------------------------- If you're not a YouTube member yet, you can join here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrSIvbFncPSlK6AdwE2QboA/join 00:00 - Start 00:16 - iterm2 phase 01:57 - The Alacritty phase 02:27 - The Kitty phase 03:28 - The WeZterm phase 04:28 - The Ghostty phase 05:16 - The man that broke our family apart 07:57 - Back to Kitty 09:15 - Going back to Ghostty? #linkarzu #ghostty #alacritty #wezterm