A month ago, I wrote this in another thread ("Curling This Website Was a Mistake, but you *should* do it anyway (+ Ghost TTY)"): On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 at 12:23, Giles Orr <gilesorr@gmail.com> wrote:
Speaking of terminals: I switched from `alacritty` to `kitty` a few months ago. `ghostty` was the other option: I think both support both X11 and Wayland, but the main reason for the switch beyond that was that both support `timg` ( https://github.com/hzeller/timg ). The deciding factor was that `kitty` is in the Debian repositories while `ghostty` is not. I'm willing to build from source if there's a compelling reason to do so - but in this case there isn't because `kitty` meets my needs.
I find it necessary to respond to my own message ... One of my old machines with a spinning disk - with 16G, not 8G - was swapping ferociously. And I'm not doing video or even photo editing on it. A couple days ago I finally got around to figuring out how to determine what was causing that (I installed Debian's `smem` Python script ... which pulled in more than 250MB of dependencies ...). Which seemed to show that the ten or so `kitty` instances I was running were each consuming multiple gigs of memory. Not all together - each one uses several gig. So I killed them all and went back to `xterm` and hey, look at that: 50G of swap that was full is suddenly empty and the machine is back to being its old responsive self. (Don't ask why I have a 50G swap partition. I don't know either. Probably some abandoned experiment.) Anyway: `kitty` is a very good terminal. It's also a very good way to destroy your machine's performance. I assume this is because it's storing pixel-level scroll-back logs or something like that. I'll keep it around for the use case I threw out in that other thread (viewing images on remote command-line-only servers with `timg`), but I'm in the midst of reconsidering my terminal choices ... -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com