When comparing Hyper vs kitty, the Slant community recommends kitty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?” kitty is ranked 4th while Hyper is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose kitty is:
Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.
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Pros
Pro Beautiful
Pro Great community support, extensions etc
Pro Fully customizable
If you are familiar with web standards, you will be at home in this terminal.
Pro Limited set of features out of the box
Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. If a plugin doesn't exist just as you like, write it. That extensibility, folks.
Pro Extensible Kitten framework
Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.
Pro Window tiling
Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag.
Pro Tabs for multiple instances
Operate several terminals from one window using the tabs feature, allowing you to make simultaneous connections to different remote hosts.
Pro Scrollback buffer viewer
Allows for viewing the scrollback buffer in an external pager of your choice ('less' by default, with support for 'more' and 'most'), a huge benefit for turning actions taken in a live terminal session into a script for efficiency or dissemination or collaborating on workflows.
Pro Controlled and configured from the shell prompt within the program itself
No graphical menus to clutter the screen saves system resources and time once you learn that all those options are still available from the command line within the app.
Cons
Con Limited set of features out of the box
Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. Yet, taking the other listed con of immature plugin ecosystem into account, this leads to either living without the feature or using an unstable plugin.
Con Can be slow
Example benchmark against iTerm in this Youtube video.
Con Immature plugin ecosystem
Very often you'll find features behaving unexpectedly after installing plugins. Even the popular ones.
Con CJK languages not working
Con Needs an account to work and sends your commands to some server
Apart from the security implications this is slowing things down, making it sometimes unusable!