# Kitty terminal emulator 79 Hacker News commenters recommended Kitty terminal emulator and 29 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 2 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** People recommend Kitty for its speed, customisation, inline image display and SSH clipboard support. The most common caveat is that some find the maintainers' behaviour abrasive. ## Why people recommend it - Fast, lean, responsive rendering (4 comments): "Mostly because it's very customisable, fast, lean, ligatures, separate font for italics, great macro support, and supports automatic tiling panes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207517)) "Kitty just feels faster when rendering editors or TUIs with a lot happening" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48468586)) "kitty was many times faster than Konsole and Ghostty even faster" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50263234)) - Highly customisable and feature-rich (5 comments): "Mostly because it's very customisable, fast, lean, ligatures, separate font for italics, great macro support, and supports automatic tiling panes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207517)) "Kitty is the best one. It has several features which have proven so useful I wasn't able to stay on anything else for more than a couple of hours" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47208580)) "Kitty is powerful enough to practically act like a second desktop environment (that is also cross-platform)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888759)) - Displays images and graphics inline (4 comments): "Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777974)) "A modern terminal emulator like Ghostty or Kitty can render images, even over ssh." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035950)) "don't mind waiting a few tens of ms in exchange for kitty's graphics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266611)) - Clipboard and images work over SSH (3 comments): "If all you want is clipboard integration over ssh, then, perhaps, kitty terminal might be enough." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171493)) "Its remote clipboard integration works over SSH, including images." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50156765)) "Therefore, I still use Kitty, especially for SSH connections." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47208122)) ## What people warn about - Maintainer behaviour seen as abrasive (2 comments): "Kitty does now but I personally find the maintainers behaviour a bit abrasive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143013)) "I have been personally attacked by several people from all of these projects just for asking simple questions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49716092)) - Wide character and emoji handling problems (2 comments): "Changing a character's width from wide to narrow after it has already been output is fraught with problems for a terminal." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814994)) "they "support" it by treating the preceding emoji character as being Narrow instead of Wide" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812529)) - Non-standard file and terminfo hacks (2 comments): "The horrible kludge in Kitty of embedding pathnames inside VT-100 codes and making the terminal emulator delete the file when done" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45890601)) "having to kitty-ssh or whatever to set appropriate terminfo otherwise it breaks was really irritating" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941765)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Ghostty](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghostty.md): 401 recommend - [Termux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/termux.md): 188 recommend - [iTerm2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/iterm2.md): 95 recommend - [Warp terminal](https://hackerapproved.com/p/warp-terminal.md): 84 recommend - [WezTerm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wezterm.md): 59 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Kitty terminal emulator", https://hackerapproved.com/p/kitty/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).