Kitty

kitty is a GPU-based terminal emulator for Linux, macOS and various BSDs, built for keyboard-driven users who spend most of their day in a terminal. It draws everything with OpenGL instead of a UI toolkit, uses threaded rendering and SIMD CPU instructions, and exposes its performance trade-offs as config options. The code is C for the performance-sensitive parts, Python for the UI and extensions, and Go for the command-line kittens.

Window management is built in. Each OS window holds tabs, and each tab arranges several kitty windows using one of seven layouts: Fat, Grid, Horizontal, Splits, Stack, Tall and Vertical. Splits allows arbitrary horizontal and vertical splits. Session files, loaded with kitty --session or the startup_session option, define tabs, layouts, working directories and startup programs. All configuration lives in a single kitty.conf file. Remote control lets scripts or the shell, even over SSH, open windows and tabs, change colors, fonts and layouts, and read text from one window or send text to another. Watchers are Python scripts that run on events such as a window being resized or closed.

kitty introduced the kitty graphics protocol and its own keyboard protocol, and it adds colored and curly underlines. It supports ligatures, variable fonts, and per-range font substitution, so powerline symbols work without patched fonts. Hyperlinks can trigger configurable open actions. Shell integration for zsh, fish and bash adds jumping between prompts and opening the last command's output in a pager, and the whole scrollback can be opened in less or piped to any command. Kittens are small terminal programs that extend kitty: kitten icat shows images, even over SSH, kitten diff is a diff tool with image support, and kitten ssh wraps ssh to copy kitty's terminfo to the remote host, set up shell integration there and reuse connections.

The main trade-off is the custom xterm-kitty terminfo entry. On hosts that lack kitty's terminfo files, programs report an unknown terminal or arrow keys stop working, which the FAQ suggests fixing with kitten ssh. Running commands through sudo or su can cause the same problem. Windows is not among the supported platforms.

Installation

# via Binary installer (macOS and Linux)
curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin