Introduction

Title. I moved back to using the kitty terminal with tmux. My experiment with trying to use WezTerm for everything fell short for a couple of reasons that I will outline in this mini post, but the TL;DR is I just don’t think my WezTerm configuration was stable enough for my system. The WezTerm muxing was not stable enough for me which led to a lot of headache.

Why I moved off

I don’t know what caused this, but when using WezTerm with its muxer, it has this habit of leaving fragments of old pop-ups behind. Let’s say I am programming in Neovim. I use a completion engine which means I have little menus pop up whenever I am writing text. Sometimes when typing, these pop-up windows would leave fragments of themselves behind. If I were to <C-d>zz quickly, it would hang up and sometimes cause my bar to print twice. The editing experience was overall very stupid for absolutely no reason. I also had issues with input latency. I always felt like my key strokes were a little behind what they should be on WezTerm.

Why did I go back to kitty?

I would say that I am very openly not the biggest fan of kitty’s main developer kovid. It’s why when I moved off of Ghostty, I went back to alacritty instead. I didn’t want to deal with kitty and its weird font rendering. But kitty has a feature that other terminals don’t have, and it’s something that’s keeping me here for the time being. Cursor trails. This is an incredibly stupid thing to get hung up over but I just think it’s really cool and I am enjoying using it a lot. There are no other reasons behind it. I think the cursor trail is cool. I also don’t mind the font rendering anymore, I think the terminal is overall very snappy, I don’t care whether or not the terminal I’m using works with my X61, etc. I am starting to get a lot less anal about backwards-compatibility and more focused towards what will help me get work done now. It’s safe to say that I am done with random experimenting over non-orthodox software and am focusing on just getting things done.

My philosophy

I want the tools I use to help me get done what needs to get done. Me swapping over the DWM, a full wezterm stack, and using infinite Neovim plugins didn’t get me there. It’s why over time my Neovim config has actually shrunk in size. If something causes more headache than anticipated and I don’t have the time to learn it, I remove it. I don’t need it. I lived without it before, and there’ll be other times to learn it; but now isn’t the time. AwesomeWM is amazing, and I genuinely think Awesome is the proper way to experience DWM without having to deal with DWM. I think kitty is an amazing terminal with a lot going for it, despite the controversial asshat of a core maintainer. I am done with judging software by who writes it. If I didn’t like how a developer acts in the public and towards other developers, then I shouldn’t be using Linux, or Ruby on Rails. So fuck it. Life is too short. Good software is good software, and you can only appreciate good software when the time is right in your life, and you realize why you need and why the benefits actually matter.