Kitty
ActiveOverview
kitty is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator designed for users who spend significant time in the terminal. It uses OpenGL rendering, GPU acceleration, and SIMD instructions for high performance, supports tiling windows and tabs, true color, ligatures, image display, and keyboard protocol extensions.1346
Key Features
- GPU Rendering - Uses OpenGL and GPU acceleration with threaded rendering for fast performance.
- Tiling Windows - Supports tiling multiple windows and tabs like tmux or GNU Screen.
- Kittens - Extendable with supplemental programs called kittens for added features.
- TrueColor and Ligatures - Supports true color output and font ligatures.
- Image Display - Displays images via icat kitten with ImageMagick.
- Keyboard Protocol - Protocol extensions for advanced keyboard input.
- Hyperlink Support - Clickable hyperlinks and mouse support for applications like Vim.
- Customizable - Single config file for shortcuts, rendering, and more.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Community | Free | Full feature set under GPL-3.0 license. |
Platforms & Requirements
Runs on Linux, macOS, and BSD distributions via installers, GitHub releases, or package managers like Arch Linux; requires OpenGL support. Manual installation involves symlinks and desktop files on Linux. No Windows support.234
Integrations & Ecosystem
- ImageMagick for image display
- tmux/GNU Screen-like tiling
- Vim mouse and copy/paste buffers
- Unicode input by name/code
- xdg-terminal-exec protocol
- kitten extensions for scripting
Alternatives
| App | Difference |
|---|---|
| Alacritty | Rust-based GPU terminal focused on speed and simplicity, lacks tiling and kittens. |
| tmux | Terminal multiplexer that runs inside other terminals, not a standalone emulator. |
| iTerm2 | macOS-specific with similar features but no GPU rendering or Linux support. |
| PuTTY/KiTTY | SSH clients for Windows, not full GPU terminal emulators. |
Reputation
kitty is praised for its speed, GPU acceleration, and innovative features like kittens and graphics protocols among power users and developers.167 Criticisms include complex configuration and lack of Windows support. It maintains an active development with frequent updates as of recent changelogs.78
Sources (8)
- https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
- https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/binary/
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kitty
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_(terminal_emulator)
- http://www.9bis.net/kitty/
- https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
- https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/
- https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/