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It is the Gimp of book management.

Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.

Works amazingly well.

Looks amazingly bad.

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 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.

I'm curious, why did you move if there is also now the new Ghost TTI with 0.4? What do you benefit from this?

I use this icon too! Only thing I customize after installing kitty.

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.

> 'open last execution log' (ctrl + shift + g). It's a lifesaver.

When do you use this? (guessing, when you run something that crashes the terminal?)

Possibly related: I use ctrl+shift+h (and somehow configured it to use neovim), which is a nice way to navigate the terminal history - useful when pilfering through thousands of lines of local server logs

Doesn't `kitten ssh` solve the problem?

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/

Putting the following in my ~/.ssh/config fixed all ssh-related issues I had with kitty.

  Host *
    SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"

I've had so many issues with SSH that I ended up ghosttying kitty.

I have the same SSH qualms. I still use it because there's not much better for what I need.

I use a cursor following shader. It is subtle, but i feel like it draws your eye to where ever the input cursor lands. I train users on a tui application, and it seems to help them as well.

Variable fonts are not necessarily non-monospace. It's about one font file for regular to bold weight and so on.

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.

Ghostty UX feels more polished compared to Kitty. I tried Kitty for a while but just did not like the default UX.

Kitty renders some icons badly but ghostty doesn't. In a nutshell, kitty takes some rendering shortcuts that cause the bad rendering:

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.

UI-wise, I kinda like Ghostty more. It feels slightly more polished. However, I've moved to Kitty mainly because of its native session support. The only way to have sessions in Ghostty is through a multiplexer, which I'm not a fan of anymore.

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.

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).

WezTerm has worked fine for me. Windows however has ConPTY which is better than what was before but still a nuisance if one whats to use advanced escape sequences and other things that modern terminals support.

Windows Terminal. I used to use things like Kitty but don't see a need these days.

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.

My favorite Windows alternative is Linux, specifically Manjaro

i use alacritty on every single OS and i absolutely love it.

Does GhosTTY work on windows?