Published: Fri, 03 Jan 2025 16:20:03 -0800
He's recently started getting into Linux, starting off with a tried and true Arch + i3 setup. I cannot put into words the joy that came over me when he first sent me the photo of his little repurposed chromebook with the neofetch output on the tty. It's good to have someone to share this hobby with, better yet with one of the best friends I have.
We had him over for our New Years Eve celebration and to my pleasant surprise he brought the chromebook. He let me play around with it and check out his config, which was almost nostalgic for me, having not used anyone else's configs since I first started tinkering with window managers back in 2017. It was refreshing to try something different to how I would set it up, seeing what someone else prioritises. One thing that caught my eye was that he was using kitty for his terminal emulator. Seeing as I had just jumped to wezterm, I was eager to see if the grass was truly greener on the other side.
Of course, terminal emulators don't widely vary from one another, but where they do differ often makes or breaks their usability. I had tried kitty years ago before I switched to alacritty and remembered it fondly, except for the "bell" sound which got irritating, though is easily disabled (why I never did originally disable it escapes me). He showed me kitty's image rendering support and I immediately fell in love. I had a preconceived notion it was more similar to ueberzug or w3m-img, but in reality behaved much more like sixels. I felt like an idiot for not having given it a try sooner and working solely on my assumptions.
That brings us to today, where I have now once again migrated terminal emulators from wezterm to kitty. The transition was just about painless, though my font of choice, terminus, was not a TrueType font and thus was not supported. Fortunately there was a TrueType version of it, but I opted to change fonts. Although I find Terminus to be aesthetically pleasing, it is not great for readability, especially in large blocks of text. So I opted to use the Hack font, one I had used in the past, as well as the font my friend had been using. You will also see this for the website, which had used Terminus prior to this post.
Kitty is trying to accomplish more than what I normally look for in a terminal emulator, but it is executing it well and the image protocol seems to be being adopted as a defacto standard. It's nice to have a config you feel comfortable and familiar with, but it's also nice to have some change every once in a while.
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