On: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emu...

[rbanffy]

You may have better font rendering (anti-aliasing support on low-dpi screens), faster rendering and scrolling, better support for terminal attributes (crossed-out, overline, italic, etc). iTerm does a lot of optimizations so it can render and scroll faster (I volunteered to add a feature to it, and I dug a bit through the code).

For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't. Gnome's terminal (vte, actually) does support overline (I volunteered adding it to iTerm, but I'm nowhere near close), which is handy for status lines, as well. I think there is one that takes ANSI codes seriously enough to support double-height and width.

To see what's missing, you can look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

[matt4077 → rbanffy]

Terminal.app is orders of magnitude faster than iTerm, or any other alternative. As in: less than a second v 30 seconds for cat <big file>.

[coldtea → matt4077]

With the metal renderer?

[lelf → rbanffy]

For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't

It does (just checked).

[rbanffy → lelf]

I believe it's only supported if the font has a defined italic version, and it's unable to generate italic from a regular face.

[tambourine_man → rbanffy]

Which is a major no-no anyway, typographically speaking.

[rbanffy → tambourine_man]

We are talking about terminals. Italics used to be drawn by skewing the pixel clock.

[tambourine_man → rbanffy]

Sure but we have bitmap displays now. There’s no reason our tools can’t take advantage and adapt to the times.

[rbanffy → tambourine_man]

True, but generating italics when they are not explicitly defined is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.