kitty

Raised as a usability problem by 28 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 17 threads.

People raised many different problems with kitty, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 31 complaints

Couldn't find a font configuration that renders legibly across screens and pixel densities2026-10-28
Default font rendering barely readable at about 100 DPI, forcing a switch to legacy rendering2026-03-01
Kitty takes 2-3 seconds to open a window when launched2025-11-04
Enter key and Ctrl-C do not work, forcing the user to kill the app2025-02-01
No settings GUI; themes and font size hard to find and change2024-05-25
Terminal hangs for a minute or two on invalid unicode sequences2024-05-22
Found the terminal emulator confusing, so the user gave up on it2023-10-09
Over SSH without terminfo, backspace and common keys stop working2023-10-08
Ctrl-Alt-3 keypress arrives as plain 3, so the key combo silently breaks2022-05-13
Must manually set a confusing SSH config option to avoid overriding the terminal setting2022-02-15
Editor exit makes commands disappear from screen; no easy way to disable second buffer2022-02-15
Input lag around 300ms makes typing feel slow and laggy2020-10-01
Cannot resize tiles with mouse or per-axis keys, making arrow-key resizing impossible2020-10-01
CLI tools accept different arguments in sessions than outside them, barely documented2020-09-30
Initially font spacing renders wrongly and colour configuration is more complex2020-09-30
Can't figure out how to change font color or stop title updates2020-09-30
Copies text to clipboard continuously during click-and-drag, cluttering clipboard history2020-08-01
Scrolling in Kitty is terrible, which made the user switch away2020-03-27
Sessions are lost when the GUI hangs or crashes, with no easy way to restore them2019-10-30
Confusing OS windows versus panes, missing conventional shortcuts, and no menus to discover features2018-09-07
Theme can only be changed by editing the config file, which is inconvenient2018-09-06
No menus, so user had to dig through config file to find tabs2018-09-06
Cannot resize layout borders with the mouse ad hoc; must configure instead2018-09-06
Pane border lags about half a second behind the mouse when resizing2018-09-06
Default shortcuts are counterintuitive, with no Cmd+T for new tab or Cmd+W to close2018-09-06
Background of lines left black when scrolling in vim until refreshed2018-09-06
Terminal escape code documentation is poor, forcing trial and error and hex dump digging2018-06-08
Standard CUA shortcuts like Ctrl-arrow, Shift-Ins and Ctrl-PgUp behave differently or are missing2017-01-07
Can't run WSL in Kitty since WSL requires a terminal to start2017-01-07
Simple operations like marking a file take 10 seconds, maxing out CPU2016-11-14
Saved username persists across windows, hard to fix a mistyped name2016-11-13