I've gone through a lot of terminal emulators by now, and have always
switched between URxvt and Termite (due to the features they support).
For URxvt, this is particularly cumbersome since the version in the
official repositories does not have the patches required for practical
use. Even with patches applied, URxvt supports neither true color nor
emoji. Termite worked well, but it lacked image support.
Kitty features all of the following:
- True color support
- Image support
- Emoji support
- Icon fonts support
- Transparency support
Additionally, projects like Ranger and Neofetch have already taken the
initiative to support the Kitty image protocol (which, luckily for me,
are the only programs I use with images in the terminal).
Why not Alacritty, the other GPU-based terminal?
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Although Alacritty is also very performant, there are several things
that keep me away from this terminal emulator.
Alacritty, as of this writing, renders neither images nor emoji.
Although it is certainly possible to use a terminal emulator without
either of these, the lack of these features limits what you can do with
the program you (presumably) spend the most time with on your computer.
The current config setup is "all or nothing"; I cannot remove defaults
from my alacritty.yml and expect those same defaults to carry over.
Even common terminal escape sequences are hard-coded into the config
file, which cannot be removed without breaking things.
Some other benefits of kitty:
- Full image support in transparent terminals
- w3m hack + loop is no longer necessary for persistent images
- No weird artifacts around the image
- Can highlight text without affecting the image
- Images aren't lost after switching between desktops
After a considerable amount of research, I finally understand how to use
chmod and what file permissions in linux actually mean.
It turns out that git can commit both regular files (644 permission) and
executable files (755 permission). This is great since changing file
permissions manually after a git clone is no longer needed.
This useful feature is enabled by default, however, it seems like I
disabled it a long time ago. If this is you, simply re-enable it by
setting `filemode` to true in your .git/config.
Realistically, you won't need my wal config if you are not using my
bspwm setup, since wal does a good job at otherwise changing most other
color schemes that you may find in, e.g., a GNOME or Plasma setup.
