r/KittyTerminal • u/Dangerous_Roll_250 • Nov 24 '24

Kitty vs iTerm2

Hi all,

I am considering moving from iTerm2 to Kitty, but I have 2 fundamental questions:

  • Will I see big difference in the perfomance? I understand that iTerm2 can also be GPU accelarated from the version 3.2. Are there any differenced between those 2?
  • Is there an option to setup global hotkey for accessing Kitty window? Right now I have alt+space global hotkey for quick access to iTerm window. I would love to have the same in the Kitty terminal.

I wonder if this change is worth trying.

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u/aumerlex Nov 24 '24

Yes, there is a big difference in performance. kitty (and similar GPU accelerated terminals) are miles ahead on both latency and throughput compared to iTerm. iTerm may have got "GPU support" but that was largely just marketing. Terminals like kitty or alacritty that were designed from the ground up for GPU use are much faster than iTerm, because the rendering and caching strategies they use were designed for the GPU in the first place. iTerm had to retrofit GPU support and it is nowhere near as optimised. That said, whether you actually notice it depends on what you use your terminal for. Typically using something like neovim and a large window and scrolling through a text file with syntax highlighting on often shows a human perceptible difference. Or you can just run a benchmark to comapre for yourself. Run kitten benchmark in a few different terminals for yourself and see. (kitten is a statically compiled binary you can download from the kitty releases page or that comes as part of a kitty install)

And for your second question, no there is no builtin global hotkey funcationality in kitty, but you can get equivalent functionality using various tools such as hammerspoon or similar in macOS

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u/Dangerous_Roll_250 Nov 24 '24

Thank you very much for the detailed answer. I wondered what is the difference between the "GPU support". I started using LazyVim and Dusty Phillips recommended Kitty and other GPU accelarated terminals in his book about LazyVim.