> Any insight into how this one compares to Alacritty and Kitty?
In terms of customization and configuration, I'd say foot falls between Alacritty and Kitty with Kitty being the most customizable and configurable while Alacritty being the least.
One of the things I really like about Alacritty and foot is that they don't enforce italic and bold monospace variants while Kitty does. I despise italic variants of monospace fonts. Most monospace fonts don't even have proper italic variants. They're just slanted.
I tried using foot a few days ago but went back to Alacritty because of this issue.
I think I might move back to foot though because it felt a bit faster (lesser latency) and for some reason, text on Alacritty is sometimes blurry for me.
Hey; what do you mean by "force"? I mean, to me this reads like you don't want to see italic nor bold font in the terminal (due to lag of monospace support in that regard maybe).
But I think having the possibility of italic, bold, bold+italic in the TE is a very good thing. And if you do not want that I think Kitty allows you to just use another font then; please correct me here, but I think that is configurable. Bold text in the TE world is yet another heated discussion. Some people like it bold, some people like the color to be intensified instead when using `SGR 1` (which is responsible for making font intensified/bold).
> And if you do not want that I think Kitty allows you to just use another font then
Do you really believe that's reasonable? That I should stop using my favorite monospace fonts just because a terminal emulator doesn't let me disable italic variants of that font when other terminal emulators like Alacritty and foot do?
I don't think that's reasonable and so I stopped using Kitty. And no, I'm not gonna resort to fontconfig hacks or manually delete the italic otf/ttf files. I'd rather use a terminal that gives me choice rather than imposes it.
> Some people like it bold, some people like the color to be intensified instead when using `SGR 1` (which is responsible for making font intensified/bold).
Indeed, and the right solution is a config options, just as was done in Windows Terminal, since nobody is wrong: it's just a matter of preferences!
The right technical way of handling preferences is offering more choices to the users, with some sane default that will satisfy most users.
Personally, I love italics (I use vim and I want comments shown in italics, and I make an heavy use of bold+italics, cf https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow/blob/main/after/syn... ) but I would not want to force this option to people who don't want italics, for their own reasons that are none of my business (actually, if they reasons are good enough, it may cause me to change the default choices, but I would never remove the user freedom to make such choices in the first place)
IMHO that's the key difference between MacOS/iOS/Gnome/new school linux on one side (fewer freedoms) and Windows/KDE/old school Linux (more freedoms)
I've not installed Foot myself yet (on the todo list today) but I don't think either Alacritty or Kitty support the Sixel interface itself.
Kitty supports images via a custom API. There's loads of really cool plugins for it but what's interesting about Sixel support is that it's a standard, even if it's primitive.
I'm not sure that Alacitty can support images or, at least, I couldn't see that reported anywhere (it's been a while since I ran it myself).
In terms of performance Foot seems to compare well to both[1].