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 ...